culture | dmitrii stakhov, translated by thomas newlin

The Prose
(and Cons) of Vodka

Once you think about it, the old “snow, bears, and vodka” think—but was duly purchased nonetheless, and not just
stereotype about Russia isn’t too far off the mark. There’s snow one bottle, mind you. We put it all away that same evening
on the ground here half the year, and though bears have in one sitting. Although we still had a backup supply of
taken a real hit over time, they’re still the symbol of our alcohol, we decided we needed a little something to whet
country’s most powerful political party, the Kremlin-backed our palates during the day, so we headed off by motorboat
One Russia, as well as a target for protection by zealous con- to one of the villages along the river to check out its store.
servationists. As for vodka, the last part of our trinity, Russians The congregation of glum-looking fellows smoking acrid
drink it just as they always have. But here I should note that cigarettes into their fists and eyeing us unsympathetically
vodka is more than just alcoholic drink No. 1 in Russia: it has immediately made it clear that there wasn’t any vodka: they
become a symbol, a cultural yardstick, a signifier. It is also were waiting for the arrival of the delivery truck and had no
firmly established as a kind of socioepistemological gauge (“Do use for added competition from us.
you know so-and-so?” “Sort of, but I’ve never drunk with On display inside the store itself was a row of very strange
him, so I can’t really say what kind of person he is”), as well bottles—by all appearances milk bottles, and sealed like
as an important quick fix for the state budget, since Russian milk bottles with little round foil caps, but containing some
politicians traditionally have never had much use for long- sort of murky lilac-colored liquid. The locals explained
term planning and prefer instead to draw straight from the that this was a product of the fish-processing facility nearby
nearest trough. The fact that so many people have turned and that it was something that even they, having fallen on
into drunken loonies as a result has never been of any par- hard times, hesitated to drink. But we weren’t about to wait
ticular concern to them: vodka production has always been around for the delivery truck, so we bought some of this
a top strategic priority, every bit as important as the produc- “fortified” stuff and headed back to our camp. It wasn’t until
tion of, say, the Satan intercontinental ballistic missile. later that night, around the campfire, that we screwed up
Nevertheless, as a true yardstick of Russian life, vodka enough courage to give Kalinin’s vin de terroir a try. The

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has on numerous occasions ceded its status as drink No. 1 to effect was quite literally breathtaking: our jaws clenched,
various other, at times highly exotic, beverages. During the our throats constricted in spasms, our stomachs contracted.
late 1970s some friends and I were on a fishing trip along After the first swig we felt like our insides had been turned
the Volga River near Kalinin, now Tver. We stopped en route inside out. We had no choice but to chuck it all. My only
at a little general store, the Leningrad, to pick up some regret was my father’s prized Japanese mug: the enamel, 25
supplies, and there, right out on the shelf, among what for which up until then had withstood every kind of libation
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a Soviet consumer constituted an extraordinary array of imaginable, had turned a permanent shade of vile pink.
choices, we came across a dry Spanish red, Rioja Alta, the Indeed, there has long been a sense that drinking in
very same wine that Hemingway wrote about in The Sun Russia—and drinking in Russia means drinking alcohol—
Also Rises. (The open-stack access to alcohol that Soviet is a, well, fluid phenomenon. Vodka (or for that matter any
consumers enjoyed at the time didn’t last long at all: steal- other type of booze whose alcohol content is calculated
ing was endemic, and people would even guzzle stuff down in relation to vodka’s proof) has always had a certain inher-
right on the spot. I was personally acquainted with a guy— ent dynamic volatility. Vodka, for example, has served not
a radio technician for fighter planes—who could chug down only as a mark and a gauge of respect, as a substitute for
a bottle of vodka in eleven seconds flat, thirteen max.) The religion, and as a measure of value that at times, even quite
rioja was insanely expensive—four and a half rubles, I frequently, replaced money; it has also been a measure of
gastronomica: the journal of food and culture, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 25–28, issn 1529-3262. © 2005 by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for
permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the university of california press ’ s rights and permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu / journals/ rights.htm.
 value that has fluctuated rapidly, even precipitously. During Once, on a business trip to this region, I took along a
the Brezhnev era, for instance, the standard unit of exchange— few bottles of the vodka then making the rounds, referred
the proverbial bottle—never had, for all its considerable to as “Andropovka,” which sold for four rubles and twenty
worth, the kind of value that it would acquire later on, at kopecks, eight kopecks higher than the old price, because
the height of Gorbachev’s sobriety campaign. the cost of the bottle itself had gone up. I was neither a
In any case, around 1986, when vodka simply stopped speculator nor, of course, a native—just an ordinary journal-
being sold, in exchange for just one of those proverbial bot- ist. Some of the vodka I drank with “local comrades”; some
tles it was possible to get two tugboats with a total crew of I gave away as a gift. On the way out of these hospitable
seven men to spend an hour and a half freeing up a yacht climes, I got stranded in a little settlement called Berezov,
that had run aground on a shoal on Lake Beloye: in other situated on the river Sosva, a tributary of the Ob: the land-
words, an undertaking that at the going rate should have ing strip of the little airport there had been washed out by
cost close to one hundred and fifty rubles if contracted heavy rains. This was the same place, incidentally, where
through strictly official channels was done at a fortieth the back in the early eighteenth century Peter the Great’s good
price by a bunch of guys who were simply eager to toss down buddy Alexander “Aleksashka” Menshikov languished in
(strictly unofficially!) a healthy dose of Russia’s life-giving exile after falling out of favor with the Tsar. I was wandering
elixir. What’s more, vodka’s vaunted status as an indicator around the airport hangar waiting for the helicopter that
of respect, faith, and so on has changed with the times. In was supposed to take me to Khanty-Mansaysk when another
short, everything under the sun ebbs and flows, like the ever- guy there—likewise stranded—motioned me over. “Hey,
coursing vodka that flows eternally to, and from, the glass how about a quick drink?” he asked. We headed off to the
(or mug, crystal goblet, milk carton, lens cap—underline back of the hangar. The guy was carrying a plastic bag that
your choice or insert something else as appropriate), and all you couldn’t see through; I immediately started trying to
things—the pleasant buzz, the drunken stupor, the hangover— guess what might be in it. Vodka? Wine? Eau de cologne? If
must pass. As a recent flag-waving ad for a certain type of it was eau de cologne then it would actually be better if it
beer puts it, everything—“along with Russia, with our whole were one of the cheaper kinds, which during the Soviet
country!”—is on the move. period were made almost entirely from decent-quality spirit
Actually, it was not during the Gorbachev era, with its of alcohol with a bit of perfume mixed in. But what if it was
patronizing alcohol-rationing system, when the sheer idiocy of that particular bargain brand called “Clove”—thick, super-
the government topped even the yawning heights of stupidity spicy, and completely undrinkable? However, what he pulled
attained in the Brezhnev years (no mean accomplishment!) out surprised even me, someone who had seen pretty much
that we got our first whiff of certain potentially radical changes everything: the bag contained a bottle of window-cleaner
in how and what we drink. This happened, rather, in the from Estonia, at that point still part of the glorious ussr.
brief period between Brezhnev and Gorbachev, during the Clearly relishing my shock, my newfound friend assured me
Andropov-Chernenko interregnum. that this particular kind of window-cleaner, which cost
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At that time a dry law was selectively imposed on some twenty-seven kopecks a half liter, was one you could drink,
territories by state and party officials. For instance, in the despite its fluorescent blue color and label that said “Poison,”
oil- and gas-rich regions of Eastern Siberia the sale of vodka whereas window-cleaner for thirty-four rubles should not be
and other types of liquor (with the exception of expensive drunk under any circumstances, even though it didn’t have
26 brands of cognac and fortified wines at certain specially des- a warning label and was an innocuous straw-yellow color.
ignated locations, such as hotel bars, where a so-called bar Nonetheless, I flatly refused to touch the stuff. “Well, in that
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tax was tacked onto the already high prices) was permitted case at least stay and spot me,” he said, pouring himself half
only to the local, i.e., indigenous, population, which was a mug. Evidently, he needed somebody there just in case
already hopelessly wracked by alcoholism. Even the Tsarist to administer emergency first aid as necessary—cpr, mouth-
government had refrained from selling them vodka, believing— to mouth resuscitation. He drank the mug down in one
quite rightly—that if they did no one from among the native shot. His face, quite pale up until then, was instantly suffused
tribes would be left after two or three generations. Unable with blood; his eyes rolled; spit frothed thickly from his
to consume all the vodka allotted to them, the reindeer- mouth. For some reason it seemed to me that this must be
herding Ostyaks would sell their surplus to the pipeline workers, what the face of a man being executed in an electric chair
who were likewise supplied by speculators who flew in from looks like when the current first hits. He exhaled loudly,
“the mainland.” spat, blew his nose. Then he thrust his hand into the plastic
 bag, pulled out a chunk of black bread, and tore into it essarily for the better, but it had definitely changed. And
with his crooked teeth. “That’s what they do to us folk!” he with life the very framework of drinking itself in Russia had
exclaimed, spewing crumbs. “They wanna knock us off, changed—both the conceptual framework and, pretty much
they do! Nothing doing, bub!” inevitably, the economic framework, its price structure. If
Who would have guessed that not long afterwards, back fifteen years ago the vodka-to-beer price ratio was one bottle
in Moscow, at a booth hawking tobacco and alcohol (it was of vodka to nine bottles of beer, now it was one bottle to just
the strangest of times, when you’d find fake French cognac three; likewise the vodka-to-whiskey-and-other-outlandish-
side by side with real Cuban cigars in the merchandise stalls foreign-stuff price ratio, as well as the vodka-to-wine ratio,
that sprang up everywhere almost overnight), I should find had changed tenfold, and certainly not in vodka’s favor.
myself standing in line behind a man who bore an uncanny Nowadays you see well-endowed young ladies, their

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resemblance to my rotgut-swilling pal from Berezov. This pinkies thrust out with studied nonchalance, sucking gin
look-alike had already settled on cigarettes and had one of and tonics through straws out of tall skinny glasses; cast-off
them—a menthol brand, for ladies, called “More”—dangling empties of the latest hip beers rock and roll across subway
from his puffy lips. Now, he was trying to decide what to car floors; and on the outskirts of Moscow, hard by the trol-
drink. Finally, he espied a bottle of imitation Amaretto leybus stops, in those same islands of stunted grass where 27
liqueur. “OK, that one there!” he barked, poking with his you used to see guys splayed out on their backs, cut down
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finger at a glass case with a funereal-looking crepe border. on their way home from work at the local auto plant by
“And two beers. Nah, not our stuff, gimme some of that the proverbial “green devil,” they’ve now put up nice little
Czech beer, the ‘Golden Pheasant.’” “beer gardens” where you can eat hotdogs, munch on
And then it hit me that the era of window-cleaner, bf snacks, and sip on every kind of beer under the sun until all
glue (the alcohol was extracted on a drill press by spinning a hours of the night. And to think that just thirteen years ago
photograph by faina osmanova

drill with a nozzle attachment in a big glue pot), denatured you could get only one kind of beer; you could buy it only
alcohol (always cut with sugar to make it drinkable), and if you brought in empties to exchange, and it tasted like…
even brake fluid mixed with antifreeze (a combo that simply Nah, as for what it tasted like, I’d better not go there.
killed people outright) was drawing forever to a close. Now The very essence of vodka—its animating spirit, if
we had a real choice—meaning life had changed. Not nec- you will—has changed too. It was not without reason that
©
 Oscar Rabine, one of the leading nonconformist artists of that those guys near Tver were waiting for—can no longer
the Brezhnev era, sardonically depicted the bell tower of an be bought: the unmistakably disgusting-tasting hooch of
abandoned church in the form of a vodka bottle, a drunk yore has been replaced by a “high-quality” product put out
lying in a puddle before it. The era of vodka-as-religion is by a distinctly new type of factory. A new phrase has lately
drawing to a close, and we come across fewer and fewer been added to our lexicon: “scorched vodka,” meaning vodka
drunks wallowing in puddles. But Russians aren’t drinking that has been produced without a license from contraband
less; in fact, statistically we are drinking more now than ever. alcohol with a very high proportion of fusel oils. This is a kind
The more choice and variety we have, it would seem, the of vodka that won’t give you a nice buzz but will give you a
less tolerance we have on a purely human level: there now is wicked headache. And you don’t have to be out in the country
a kind of callousness to us, a lack of ordinary everyday decency to get sick on scorched vodka—you can buy it unknowingly
that in the past would simply have seemed un-Russian. It in supposedly respectable stores in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
used to be that someone would invariably make sure that the Its producers make fantastically accurate knock-offs of the
local drunk got home safely; now that same drunk is lucky bottles, labels, and screw-tops of genuine vodka brands and
if he’s only robbed of his last penny. These days it’s pretty have even figured out how to put on “quality seals” that
much impossible to go into a store, as we once did all the look exactly like the laser-generated originals.
time, with only a ruble plus change in your pocket and find Vodka, it would seem, is gradually losing all the quali-
two other guys in the same dilemma with whom you can ties that once made it something special. It’s becoming just
“fix things up” on the spot—that is, go in on an impromptu another product, an ordinary commodity—one among
threesome to buy a bottle of vodka. Now, it’s every man for many—without any particular meaning or value. The poetry,
himself, and the drinking parties that used to take over the mythos, the thrill of vodka is gone, and the prose of the
apartment-block playgrounds after dark are a thing of the free market has filled the vacuum. Perhaps that’s the way it
past. These same playgrounds now attract a younger, largely should be. But all the same, prose (and don’t get me wrong
teenage set, most of them with suspiciously dilated pupils. here: I’m far from nostalgic about the past) will always be just
And of course vodka itself, as a product, has changed prose—even if it’s the prose of vodka that we’re talking about.g
too. Although the enormous array of different vodkas avail-
able in Russia far outstrips all the whiskeys and bourbons
combined, the vodka we all once knew—the kind of stuff
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