The History of Vodka — The Drink Governments Used to Control People for 500 Years

[00:00:00]In 1985, Mikail Gorbachev launched his anti-alcohol campaign and ordered vineyards to be cut down across the Soviet Union. Vineyards that had stood for more than a century were destroyed.

[00:00:14]Vodka production fell to 1/3 of its previous level. Over the next 3 years, the Soviet budget lost around 50 billion rubles, roughly 15th of all state revenue. Many historians believe that this loss of income became one of the factors behind the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev wanted to break the country's dependence on vodka.

[00:00:38]Instead, he brought down the very state that depended on it. But that was only the end of one story. Ivan the Terrible established the first state-run taverns not because he loved drinking, but because a state monopoly on vodka gave him the money to wage wars without having to ask the boy for funding. Peter the Great paid the builders of St. Petersburg with vodka, quite literally as part of their wages. In the 1930s, the Soviet government deliberately expanded vodka production after realizing that a population kept drunk was easier to control. And to this day, Sweden and Poland continue to battle in European courts over the right to call themselves the birthplace of vodka, with each side presenting historical documents they claim prove their case.

[00:01:30]How did a drink that began as a medicine in monastic apothecaries become the principal financial instrument of several empires? And why would there have been no St. Petersburg, no Soviet rule, and perhaps not even the Soviet Union itself without it? The history of vodka does not begin at the dinner table. [music] It begins in an apothecary. In the 9th and 10th centuries, Arab alchemists developed the technique of distillation, which eventually reached Europe through monasteries. In Poland and the lands of Roose, monks applied it to fermented grain, [music] rye, wheat, and barley.

[00:02:09]What they produced went by different names, bread, wine, hora, okovita from the Latin Aquavite, meaning water of life. It was used as medicine, as an antiseptic for wounds, as a painkiller, as a remedy for colds, joint pain, and stomach ailments. The first written reference to vodka in Russian sources dates to 1405.

[00:02:35]It appears even earlier in Polish Chronicles, and that fact became the foundation of a centuries long dispute over its true origin. Poland insists that vodka is Polish. Russia insists that it is Russian. Sweden periodically enters the debate with its own claim.

[00:02:53][music] In 1977, the Soviet Union and Poland came close to taking the dispute to international arbitration.

[00:03:01]Officially, the question remains unresolved to this day. But in the 15th and 16th centuries, vodka was still a medicine rather than [music] a drink for mass consumption. It was expensive, produced in small quantities and available mainly to the nobility and the clergy. Everything changed when the state became involved. And the state became involved because it saw money.

[00:03:26]Ivan IV, better known to history as Ivan the Terrible, ruled Russia from 1547 to [music] 1584.

[00:03:35]He was a ruler of exceptional political skill, a deeply paranoid personality, and a man in constant need of money to finance endless military campaigns. The Abrichnina, the Levonian War, the conquest of the Kazan Kate, all of it required enormous sums of money. [music] That money had to come somewhere. In the 1550s, Ivan began building a system of state-run taverns known as Kabach, which held the exclusive right to sell vodka.

[00:04:08]The first royal Kabach opened in Moscow around 1552 immediately after the capture of Kazan.

[00:04:16]Funds for the next war were needed without delay. Private vodka sales were banned. Producing vodka outside the state system was banned. The entire vodka trade from grain to glass was brought under government control. It was both brilliant and ruthless. The state earned revenue from vodka sales. And that revenue did not depend on harvests, [music] trade routes, or the goodwill of foreign partners. People drank under every circumstance, in prosperous years and in times of famine, in peace and in [music] war. Income from vodka was more reliable than almost any other source of revenue. By the end of the 16th century, vodka sales accounted for roughly 1th3 of all state income in Russia. One drink supported a third of the empire's budget. The Kabach themselves operated under a system designed to be as harsh as possible on the customer. Food could not be purchased there, only vodka. You were not allowed to leave with an unfinished bottle. Everything had to be consumed on the premises. Tavern keepers were required to meet sales quotas and actively encouraged drinking by every means available. A government that officially claimed to care about the morality of its subjects had created a system that systematically undermined that very morality. and it did so deliberately because a drunk subject paid more than a sober one and questioned less. That system outlived Ivan the Terrible. It survived several changes of dynasty. In one form or another, it remained in place in Russia until the Soviet era. But the next ruler who transformed vodka into something truly extraordinary came a century after Ivan, and he was an even larger figure in history. Peter the Great ascended the throne in 1682 [music] and immediately devoted himself to what he would spend the rest of his life doing. Building, waging war, and spending money on a scale that shocked even his closest adviserss. A navy, a modern army, a new capital, European clothing for the boyars, clean shaven faces instead of traditional Russian beards. All of it demanded enormous resources. Peter introduced a beard tax. It sounds like a joke, [music] but it is a historical fact. Noblemen and merchants who wished to keep their beards had to pay an annual fee and carry a token proving they had paid it. Peasants paid for the right to wear a beard when entering a city. The money went into the treasury.

[00:07:06]The Treasury financed wars and construction. The building of St. Petersburg, a city raised quite literally on swamps at the cost of tens of thousands of human lives, was financed in part by vodka revenues and in [music] part by vodka itself as a form of payment. The laborers who dug canals, laid the foundations of palaces, and died from malaria in the marshes around St. Petersburg received part of their wages in vodka. This was not an act of generosity. It was an economic necessity. Russia's monetary economy was still poorly developed and vodka was a liquid, universally accepted asset that could be used as payment almost anywhere. Peter's army also received official vodka rations supposedly to keep soldiers warm in Russia's harsh climate and to boost morale.

[00:08:01]Unofficially, it served as a tool for controlling a mass of armed men who might otherwise become dangerous. The victory at the Battle of Pava in 1709 against the Swedish army of Charles I 12th, one of the greatest military victories in Russian history was won by an army that received its daily governmentissued ration of vodka. Peter died in 1725 from kidney disease, likely made worse by years of heavy drinking at the famous assemblies he himself had introduced into court life. The man who used vodka as an instrument of state building ultimately became one of its victims, although court chronicers preferred not to emphasize that connection. The state vodka monopoly he inherited and expanded outlived him by many decades. But the most disturbing thing the state would eventually do with vodka and with the people who drank it came in the 20th century. By then it was a different government armed with different tools and driven by an even colder calculation. The 1930s the Soviet Union was living through collectivization, the deculicization campaign and the first 5-year plans. The population was starving, working to exhaustion and living under constant pressure from the state. Public discontent was enormous, but expressing it was both impossible and dangerous. At that moment, the Soviet leadership made a decision that is now documented in archival records. Vodka production was deliberately expanded. Prices were lowered to make it affordable even for the poorest citizens. The network of state-owned liquor stores was enlarged.

[00:09:52]This was neither an accident nor the result of market forces. It was a political decision made at the highest level. The logic was simple and cynical.

[00:10:04]A drunk person is less likely to organize resistance. Money spent on vodka is not spent building independence.

[00:10:13]A person dependent on state vodka is dependent on the state. And a government that controls the only readily available source of comfort controls its people more effectively than any police force.

[00:10:28]Stalin is often said to have remarked that vodka was not merely a drink but an instrument for governing the masses. The quotation itself has never been conclusively verified, but the policies of the period speak for themselves.

[00:10:45]During the 1930s and 1940s, vodka revenues accounted for roughly 25 to 25% of all Soviet state income, almost the same proportion as under Ivan the Terrible. The Soviet government did not invent this system. It simply inherited it and applied a new ideological framework to it. Under Kruev and later Brezv, the system continued to function.

[00:11:15]Vodka became cheaper in relative terms as the state deliberately kept prices low.

[00:11:21]Specialized government stores that sold only vodka and other alcoholic beverages known among ordinary people as monopola operated in virtually every neighborhood of every Soviet city. The long Friday morning lines outside them became such a familiar site that almost no one stopped to ask why a state claiming to build communism worked so hard to make alcohol readily available. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was producing around 2 billion lers of vodka every year. Per capita consumption was among the highest in the world. Male life expectancy was declining. Labor productivity was falling. Alcoholrelated workplace accidents were increasing. The state had created a problem that now threatened the state itself. It was at that moment that Gorbachoff did what seemed perfectly logical to him and set in motion a chain of events that no one had intended. The year was 1985.

[00:12:29]Male Gorbach became general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and launched an anti-alcohol campaign.

[00:12:37]The decree on combating drunkenness and alcoholism was signed in May of that year. What followed was both sweeping and catastrophic. Vodka production was cut by nearly 2/3. The operating hours of stores selling alcohol were sharply restricted. In the Soviet republics with longestablished wine- makingaking traditions, Georgia, Muldova, and Crimea, bulldozers tore up vineyards that had been growing for 50 or even 100red years. News reels from the period showed tractors plowing under vines that had been producing wine since the days of the Russian Empire. Wine makers wept literally on camera. That is not an exaggeration. The results were mixed. On the one hand, alcohol consumption did decline, birth rates increased, and deaths related to alcohol fell. Those are documented facts. On the other hand, the Soviet state budget lost around 50 billion rubles a year at a time of collapsing oil prices. It was a devastating blow. Gorbachev was forced to borrow money from abroad, cut government spending, and loosen state control. That weakening created the space for glossnost and paristroka. But it also gave room to the centrifugal forces that ultimately broke apart the Soviet Union in 1991.

[00:14:04]People reacted the way they had always reacted to prohibition in Russia. Home distilling surged. Sugar disappeared from store shelves as people bought it to make homemade alcohol. Cologne and industrial alcohol began to be consumed as substitutes. Cases of poisoning increased. The government that tried to remove vodka from society discovered that people were willing to drink almost anything in its place. Historians still debate whether the anti-alcohol campaign was one of the causes of the Soviet collapse or simply coincided with it.

[00:14:44]But one fact remains. A state that had relied on vodka revenues for 400 years could not survive without them for even a few years. Ivan the Terrible understood that. Gorbachev did not.

[00:14:58]There is one story about vodka that almost everyone in the Russianspeaking world has heard. According to the legend, the great chemist Dimmitri Mendelv scientifically proved in his 1865 doctoral dissertation that the ideal strength of vodka is 40% alcohol.

[00:15:20]That is supposedly why Russian vodka has traditionally been bottled at 40% because Mendelv calculated it that way.

[00:15:29]It isn't [music] true. It is a compelling, convincing, and completely fictional [music] story. Mendelv's dissertation was titled on the combination of alcohol and water. It examined the physical and chemical [music] properties of ethanol and water mixtures at different concentrations.

[00:15:49]It contained [music] no recommendation whatsoever about the ideal strength of vodka. Mendelv was studying the density of solutions. It was an important scientific work, but it had nothing to do with vodka. The 40% standard was established not by Mendelv, but by the Russian excise law of 1894, which simply formalized what had already become common practice. That was roughly the average strength of vodka being produced at the time and a convenient round number for taxation. The Mendel of legend appeared much later, most likely during the Soviet era, and endured because it was simply too good a story to resist. A scientific justification for the nation's favorite drink. Who wouldn't want to believe that? That in itself tells us something important about vodka. It became so deeply woven into the culture that an entire mythology grew up around it. Mendelv and vodka, Ivan the Terrible and the first state tavern, Peter the Great and the Beard Tax. Some of those stories are true. Others are beautiful myths and the line between them is not always easy to see. While Soviet wine makers were mourning their vineyards, another battle was unfolding in a different part of the world. A legal war that lasted for decades and was in its own way almost absurd.

[00:17:21]Poland claims that vodka was invented in Poland in the 8th or 9th [music] century. Russia insists it was invented in Russia in the 9th or 10th century.

[00:17:32]Both sides present historical documents.

[00:17:35]Both challenge the evidence of the other. Both enlist historians who continue to uncover new arguments in support of their own version of events.

[00:17:46]In 1977, the Soviet Union appealed to international trade organizations, seeking official recognition of vodka as a Russian invention and legal protection for the name in the same way that Champagne and Cognac are protected by their geographical origins.

[00:18:06]Poland immediately filed a counter claim. Negotiations dragged on for years and ultimately produced [music] no resolution.

[00:18:16]In 2013, the European Union registered Pulska vodka as a protected geographical indication, meaning that only vodka produced in Poland from Polish grain or potatoes can legally be called Polish vodka. Russia reacted with irritation but [music] took no legal action.

[00:18:37][snorts] In practice, both identities continue to exist side by side. In law, however, the question of vodka's true origin remains unresolved.

[00:18:49]Sweden occupies a unique position in the dispute. Absolute, [music] one of the world's largest vodka brands, is marketed as Swedish vodka, produced in the town of Ohhus since 1879.

[00:19:03]The Swedes do not claim to have invented vodka itself. [music] They simply make their own and sell it around the world.

[00:19:10]Perhaps that is the smartest position of all, not to argue about the past, but to profit from the present. In 1997, American entrepreneur Sydney Frank, already 75 years old at the time and best known [music] for importing the German liquor Jerger Meister, introduced Grey [music] Goose vodka to the market.

[00:19:33]Surprisingly, it was produced in Cognac, France. Frank believed that made in France sounded more prestigious than made in Russia or made in Sweden. From the very beginning, it was positioned as an ultra premium product. The advertising appeared in magazines read by affluent consumers. The price was set at roughly twice that of its competitors, not because it cost more to produce, but because a high price is itself a powerful marketing signal of quality. It sounds simple. In reality, it was a revolutionary move that transformed the entire spirits industry.

[00:20:14]Before Grey Goose, vodka was seen as an inexpensive, neutral drink, [music] which is exactly what by its very nature it was meant to be. Colorless, odorless, tasteless. Its value lay in its strength and affordability. Why would anyone pay more for [music] something that by definition was supposed to stand out?

[00:20:35]Frank answered that question by changing it entirely. The question was no longer what you drink, but what your drink says about you. Ordering Gray Goose in an upscale bar became a status signal in much the same way that ordering Hennessy XO did at [music] a Chinese banquet.

[00:20:55]People were no longer paying for flavor.

[00:20:58]They were paying for identity. In 2004, Frank sold Grey Goose to Bikardi for $2 billion. He had spent about $8 million building the brand. That was a return of $250 times his original investment in just 7 years, one of the most successful examples of creating a luxury consumer brand from scratch.

[00:21:24]Today, the premium vodka segment is one of the fastest growing categories in the global spirits industry. A drink that by its chemical composition is supposed to be neutral and virtually identical, is sold for anywhere between $5 and $500 a bottle. The difference is marketing and little else. Ivan the Terrible, who turned vodka into a state monopoly, would probably have appreciated that strategy. The history of vodka is the story of how governments have used dependency as a tool of control. Ivon the Terrible understood that in the 16th century and created a monopoly that financed his wars. Peter the Great used vodka as a form of currency to build an empire. The Soviet government deliberately expanded vodka production whenever it needed a more manageable population. [snorts] And when Gorbachev tried to break that relationship, the state lost a third of its revenue and began to fall apart. But there is another side to this story. Vodka was not only an instrument of the state, it was also an instrument of resistance.

[00:22:32]Home distilling, outlawed under every regime, never disappeared. The very people the state tried to control through vodka made their own vodka instead and slipped beyond that control.

[00:22:45]It was a small victory, one that history rarely records, but one that happened again and again. Gorbachev did not fail because vodka was more powerful than freedom. He failed because he did not understand that you cannot remove a state's primary instrument of control without replacing it with something else. A government built on vodka revenues cannot simply stop selling vodka. It must first become a government that relies on something different. The Soviet Union never became that kind of state and in 1991 it ceased to exist.

[00:23:19]Today the global vodka market is worth roughly $40 billion a year. Russia remains the world's largest consumer.

[00:23:28][music] Poland is one of the largest exporters.

[00:23:31]Sweden sells absolute in more than 140 countries. Grey [snorts] Goose is made in France and marketed as a symbol of American success. Almost no one who opens a bottle thinks about Ivan the Terrible. But the connection between vodka and state power has never disappeared. It has simply become less visible. That too is part of the lesson.

[00:23:55]The most effective instruments of control are often the ones you never notice.

[00:24:01]Not bad for a drink that began as a monastic remedy for aching joints and that over the course of five centuries traveled from the shelves of monastery apothecaries to a state monopoly.

[00:24:13][music] From the wages of the builders of St. Petersburg to an instrument of Soviet control. From homemade moonshine in village sellers to a designer bottle in a London bar selling for £50.

[00:24:27]Every time someone opens a bottle, whether they know this history or not, they become part of a tradition [music] that is 500 years old, a tradition shaped by Zars to serve their own interests, used by Soviet officials to manage the masses, and reinvented by marketers to create the illusion of status.

[00:24:49]$40 billion. Hundreds of brands, the same clear liquid in bottles of different shapes selling for anywhere between $5 [music] and $500.

[00:25:01]Governments that tried to ban it lost.

[00:25:03][music] Governments that profited from it endured. And the people who drank it often paid a price they never fully understood. Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, [music] Stalin, Gorbachoff, Fakundo Bikardi never made vodka, but he understood the same principle through rum. Sydney Frank understood with Grey Goose that people do not pay for the drink itself. They pay for what the drink says about them. Mendelv never recommended 40% [music] alcohol. Yet, someone decided the story sounded better that way.

[00:25:39]>> [music] >> The history of vodka is a collection of stories about how a simple clear liquid becomes a mirror reflecting everything [music] people believe about power, money, status, and freedom and how rarely those beliefs match what is actually happening. Vodka is transparent. [music] Its history is not. That is the real lesson of vodka's story. It is not about the drink. [music] It is about us. about how easily we consume without asking questions and how much we can discover once we finally do. Not bad for a monastic remedy for aching joints that no one ever intended to turn into an instrument for governing empires.