The Atlantic and Its Enemies

governments, proclaiming a monopoly of drink production, made money out of it. This weird episode was studied by Stephen White (Russia Goes Dry). Russians famously had a weakness for drink, and there was public understanding for drunkenness. A good part of the State’s income, in Soviet as in Tsarist times, came from the spirits monopoly. There was a puritanical side to the early Communists, who staged ‘battles on the alcohol front’, but drink was quite an easy way of keeping the people quiescent, and the battles became bottles. By the seventies there was an evident problem, and the census revealed less and less of life in the USSR — sixteen volumes for 1959, seven for 1970, but only one, summary, for 1979. Figures for life expectancy were suppressed, and after 1963 the figures for alcohol consumption were ‘managed’, almost ignoring moonshine, which represented nearly half of the consumption. The ten litres per head of 1965 turned into fifteen in 1979, but from the railways alone 7 million litres were stolen, and nearly a tenth of families spent 40 per cent of their income on spirits (which were relatively expensive). Under Gorbachev the statistics re-emerged, revealing that life expectancy had fallen to sixty-two for a man and that pure alcohol consumption per capita had risen four times since 1940, and consumption of all drink as much as eight times. The KGB stated that university students drank all day; 15 per cent of the population was alcoholic; and Pravda was complaining that building workers started only on Tuesdays or that collective farmers were useless after midday. The police under Andropov even went round the bathhouses arresting absentees, but they could hardly interfere with the third of the workforce that was absent in order to consult a doctor.

Not long after Gorbachev acceded, in May 1985, a campaign against drink began. He himself did not touch it, and had inveighed against it long before. He had allies as well — a reformed alcoholic named Mikhail Solomentsev in the Central Committee, and Yegor Ligachev, chief secretary in Tomsk, which he made ‘dry’. Others protested, even Aliev in Baku, and Nikolay Ryzhkov, the later prime minister, who simply said that Prohibition had never worked. Boris Yeltsin in Moscow protested, but did none the less close nine tenths of the wine shops. State output went down; vines were uprooted in the Crimea, in Georgia and — most disastrously — in Nagorny Karabakh. That area, formally part of Azerbaidjan, was largely Armenian in population, but had been handed to Azerbaidjan early on, as a way of softening the blow of Soviet conquest. Wine was a principal product, and its suppression (and a subsequent calamitous earthquake) meant general impoverishment, and a considerable worsening of relations between the two peoples. But the campaign against alcohol was, generally, farcical. In Moscow there were only seventy-nine places to drink, and hotels would not serve alcohol until 2 p.m. Some towns declared themselves ‘dry’, and drunks were sacked or fined. Diplomatic gatherings were widely deserted, but of course the counterpart was a rise in the output of moonshine, as had happened in twenties America. A Temperance Society by 1988 had 428,000 branches and over 14 million members, three quarters of them over thirty. Fifty films were suppressed because they showed drunken scenes; on the radio La Traviata was shortened to cut out the drinking; an ‘agitational steamer’ went down the Volga, and medical research teams jumped onto the bandwagon, working from the Serbsky Institute of Criminal Psychiatry, with an enormous research centre for the causes and consequences of drink (one head of department was sacked for suggesting moderation). In 1986 there were victories — output of vodka down by a third. Men were denounced by their mothers-in-law and packed off to ‘cure-labour prophylactorias’ without any judicial process. However, it was all more than somewhat ridiculous. Very little could be done to stop people making samogon, and of course they did this with ingenuity. The rural background of so many told them how. There was even a computer-programmed process, and it was often superior to the state product (and sold for more). Sugar sales from 1985 to 1987 reflected this, increasing more than they had done between 1970 and 1980, and yeast also boomed, for instance in Kamchatka. Fruit was stolen in large quantities, and criminal gangs went around with tankers full of neat spirits. In Tatarstan there was an underground distillery in the very Party headquarters; a fishing trawler was found to contain 576 bottles of vodka to celebrate the navigator’s wedding; soldiers used to shave the top of their heads and then place upon them a piece of bread, soaked in boot polish that had been left to melt into it under the sun for a day or two. One workman in Vladikavkaz complained on behalf of his hundred-odd fellows that ‘ordinary people have no holidays and everyone walks around in a foul mood, like jackals’. In 1988 the whole campaign was relaxed, and soon collapsed. By 1993 Russians were ahead of Frenchmen as drinkers, but over sixty drink factories had been destroyed and there were thousands of hectares of uprooted vineyards, whether in Yalta or in the Caucasus; Georgian wines had been famous. Now, even Armenia suffered, because she had produced the corks. It all added to the great tension and the disruption of supplies in general that went ahead in 1987-8.

27. Restoration

As Goebbels, bombs raining down on his ministry, and the Russians liberating Auschwitz, had noted in his diaries, when he heard about the Yalta conference, the real battle between the Allies had not been about Poland; it had been about Germany. So it was, and forty years later the Yalta settlement was starting to unravel, beginning, for that matter, with Poland. However, the crucial decisions were taken in Moscow, as a clever Hungarian had predicted, back in 1956. The 27th Congress of the Party, held at the turn of February/March 1986, was the stage. At the time, no-one really noticed what was happening: the proceedings of the Congress amounted to the usual tidal wave of liquid concrete. The Party rewrote its statutes, modifying earlier remarks as to class war and imperialism. Even Xan Smiley, astutest of the foreign correspondents, and the Economist did not notice that something decisive had happened — a forgivable mistake (this writer has reason to hope), given the needle-in-haystack nature of truth in that system. But what was really meant was that Moscow was giving up the Berlin Wall. Within months, Solidarnosc was discussing a new Poland, and within a few more months the Berlin Wall had indeed gone, and so, thereafter, did everything else go, including, by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. There was a romantic theory that this had been achieved by ‘We, the People’, a theory that could only elicit a chuckle from the grave of Andropov. The people were Mussorgsky extras, in an operetta where Polish pretenders made trouble for Old Believers. The Politburo were stupefied by Poland: they would not send in troops, and knew that their Polish puppets were lost: what were you to do with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, marching on their knees, to a religious symbol? If the proletariat went on strike against the Communists, how were you to deal with it?

Martial law had been declared at the end of 1981, and had solved nothing: Poland still had the debts, and after a week or two the black market ran things as before. In effect it was the Pope (with the American embassy) that now ran affairs. In June 1983 he returned to Poland. If he had called for a revolution, it would have happened. He did not. The virtues of capitalism and democracy did not much interest him and in 1984 Jaruzelski himself said that the Church was an ally. There was a curious aspect, that many of the people in the Reagan administration were Catholic: Haig’s brother was a priest, and there was William Casey at the CIA. Oleg Bogomolov, for the Institute of Socialist Relations, had written a report in 1978 about what the Pope would do. It is worth noting that both Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with Ukrainian involvement, disliked the Uniates as fake. John Paul went again in 1987 and three quarters of a million people attended the Mass at Gdansk. There had been a referendum on economic reform, boycotted at the behest of Solidarnosc, and strikes had followed in the spring (1988). Lech Walesa was needed, and in January 1989 he appeared on television again. Mieczyslaw Rakowski took over as prime minister, and in February 1989 there was a round table over the price increases. The elections then occurred in June, and by now Gorbachev and the Pope were co-operating. Gorbachev informed Cardinal Agostino Casaroli in Moscow in the ineffable words: ‘The most important thing is the human being. The human being must be at the centre of international relations. That is the point of departure for our New Thinking.’ And he did release the Lithuanian Cardinal Vincentas Sladkevicius, after twenty-five years in prison. In return he had a present: the Virgin of Fatima had promised that Russia would be freed. In the summer of 1989 Poland acquired a non-Communist government, the members of which undertook to leave the Communists alone. Opinions greatly varied as to the wisdom of this, and Alain Besancon made himself unpopular, as he talked of another Convention of Targowice, or sell-out. But was there a serious alternative? Gorbachev, by now doing the rounds of ‘our common European home’, had to act over Poland, and if the Church and the Americans pushed the Poles towards a compromise element, so be it. But he would also have to get rid of ugly, tiresome little Honecker as well.

Poland was really about Germany, and another important People’s Democracy also supervened. Act two was set in Hungary. Janos Kadar, the general secretary, had promised some economic liberalization and had impressed Mitterrand. Hungary had always had a strange relationship with Austria, and Austria was now, in her way, a