There was a strange moment in the summer of 1985 which was characteristic of underlying realities. Since 1918 Moscow had refused to pay a very large sum owed to the British, partly because of war debts and partly because oil companies had been expropriated without compensation. At each Anglo-Soviet meeting, the British side would propose a discussion of this, and the Soviet would refuse. But in that summer the new foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, greatly astonished his interlocutors by saying that the matter might indeed be discussed. There was some Tsarist Russian money still held in London, at Barings Bank, and that sum — a fraction, but £40m — was now handed over, in final settlement. It all had to do with the son of Duncan Sandys and grandson of Churchill; he had connections with oil, and when the deal was done, it turned out that everybody had been cheating everybody; they all sued. But the Moscow PR machine was in action. It had always been easy for Moscow to rope together writers and actors, traditionally the most absurd commentators on public matters, no doubt because subject in a higher degree than other professionals to a combination of vanity, boredom and resentment of the capricious free market. Now a clever attempt was made at the television audiences, by people who had watched American television and the mass media. They had appreciated the importance of the visual, now that devices could convey images almost ‘live’, to masses of people who would take in a very simple message. ‘Gorby’ became a star, especially in Germany, where his book was on the bestseller list for mysterious months and months.
Back home was another matter, and there Gorbachev was far more of an Andropov than his admirers in the West thought. One thing the regime did do, and it greatly damaged its own finances. Russians drank, and 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.