Mark Lawrence Schrad. Vodka Politics

The main argument of Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State is that throughout Russia's history “an unresponsive autocratic system ... used vodka to keep the people disoriented while profiting handsomely from their misery” (p. 248). Consequently, according to Mark Lawrence Schrad, excessive alcohol abuse yielded enormous state revenue from alcohol sales and contributed directly to military defeat (and victory), revolts and revolutions, late and post-Soviet demographic crises, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Schrad is an engaging writer. He ranges across Russian history with ease, zeroing in on countless striking anecdotes and developing his story within a competent and well-researched narrative. The author brings to bear vast scholarly literature as well as published and unpublished (including archival) primary sources. He has also trawled through a huge number of old and frankly questionable historical works, such as Young Folks' History of Russia (revised ed.) from 1903, which he references many times. Moreover, his mountains of anecdotal evidence do not always persuade. Abundant contemporary denunciations of alcohol problems in Russia could have been matched for nearly any European country in the nineteenth century, as well as countered just as lavishly for those countries or even Russia. Indeed, Schrad himself cites a nineteenth-century parish priest who claimed that in Russia's Iaroslavl province there were “extremely few or even no drunkards” (p. 87).

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