The King of Vodka (31 page)

The police erected barricades to contain the masses; guards nervously staked out positions while leaders from the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Social Revolutionary Party sought to unify what they now understood to be the stirrings of a full-scale insurrection. With every passing day, the tension in Petrograd intensified. Clashes between workers and the tsar's still-loyal officers erupted sporadically. Now, gunfire pelted the crowds, clubs crashed down, delivering heavy blows to people's bodies and heads, looters ransacked food shops. The violence
did not last long, though. The tsar's defenders, many sympathetic to the people's cause, abandoned their posts and threw down their weapons. The remaining troops were then simply overwhelmed, as armored cars bearing red revolutionary banners rolled into the streets. They stormed the police stations, providing arms to the masses. The Okhrana's headquarters was looted and then burned. Defenders of the great Fortress of Peter and Paul surrendered. Finally, the Imperial Guard at the Romanov's summer residence mutinied, and with this, Russia's last tsar had no choice. Nikolay II abdicated.

A Russian newspaper reported that people bid their emperor farewell “like they were blowing fuzz from a sleeve.”
¹⁴
Most had no remorse, no regret. They were just glad to be done with him.

 

A
HUGE RED
banner floated over the Winter Palace, the residence of tsars since Peter the Great. Revolutionary fever spread to every corner of the country. For a time, a provisional government advocated freedom of speech and religion, equal rights, and a free press. It sought to revitalize the military, which was still in the throes of battle. Factories buzzed again with activity as a brief period of relief took hold. Officially, prohibition became a permanent fixture of the new Russia. Political exiles, including Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, and Leon Trotskiy, returned to their homeland. Previously these men had had little power and meager support. But in the wake of the uprising, they had opportunity. Explained one Siberian peasant: “We feel that we have escaped from a dark cave into the bright daylight. And here we stand not knowing where to go or what to do.”
¹⁵

Lenin arrived by train from Zurich at Finland Station in Petrograd in April 1917. There, a crowd of thousands welcomed him with effusive cheers, waving flags branded with the Bolsheviks slogan:
PEACE, BREAD, AND LAND!
It was as if a parched
nation had finally discovered the source of pure water. From atop an armored car, Lenin addressed his followers. He denounced the war, then embraced a revolution that had “opened a new epoch.” Afterward, at a meeting of leading activists, he outlined his plans for the future. It involved dismantling the provisional government, ridding the country of capitalists, and rallying workers, peasants, and soldiers. They were to take control of the revolution and begin the new order in Russia.

The message reverberated throughout society. The Bolsheviks soon emerged as a leading voice among the opposition parties, wooing a sea of malcontents. They feuded openly with the fledgling leadership, which still faced sporadic disturbances and constant problems fulfilling people's daily needs. Food costs were outrageous, rations too skimpy to satisfy. Shortages of raw materials and transportation snafus snarled industry, and unemployment soared. The war worsened, too, with mounting casualties. The Germans were closing in on Russia, en route to Petrograd. The post-Romanov honeymoon was over.

To revolutionaries, it was time to finish the job begun in February. The summer of 1917 brought spontaneous, violent rioting in the streets of Petrograd. Soldiers joined by 30,000 metalworkers and other troops sympathetic to the Bolsheviks launched a demonstration against the government. In all, some 500,000 participated in the movement. Soon, as shops and factories closed, employees spilled into the streets to join the march. Angry mobs unleashed their fury, looting stores, smashing windows, charging liquor reserves. They swallowed what they could, thumbing their noses at the dry laws, and then headed for Tauride Palace, home of the provisional government. There, they met resistance from pro-government forces, who fired on the masses. The revolutionaries returned an avalanche of fire, and blood from both sides of the fray filled the cracks of the city's center. For forty-eight hours, everything in Petrograd seemed to turn a shade of red—from the bloodied ground to the
signs and flags. The upper hand seesawed between the rebellious mobs and regiments called in by the state.

Finally, the edge shifted in favor of the government after it charged Lenin, Trotskiy, and other Bolshevik leaders with spying on behalf of the Germans. Officials released a document that, they said, proved that Lenin had organized the demonstrations to distract the state while its enemy mounted an offensive at the front. Despite emphatic denials from the accused, Bolshevik enthusiasts were horrified, turning their rage on the traitorous Bolshevik leaders. The offices and printing plant for
Pravda
, the Bolshevik's newspaper, were destroyed and the revolutionaries' headquarters stormed. Trotskiy and other top party members were arrested and thrown into prison while Lenin, with the aid of Stalin, slipped into Finland. The rebels' movement had not only failed, it had been disgraced.

It was a serious setback for Lenin but not a fatal one. The government still had no idea how to solve Russia's mountain of woes, and now Petrograd felt the threat of advancing German soldiers. As fall neared, people forgot the treasonous charges hurled at Lenin and other top Bolsheviks. They concluded that the state's leadership was too weak, too unstable, to hang on. No one was offering the answers they sought except the Bolsheviks. Lenin steadfastly preached for an end to the war and for sweeping social reforms, and increasingly, people turned en masse to these passionate, energized men. Lenin returned in disguise to Petrograd and settled into a Bolshevik hideout. On October 24, 1917, Trotskiy assumed the role of conductor, orchestrating a comprehensive strike. The Bolsheviks systematically seized control of Petrograd's infrastructure—from the post office to the train stations to telephone and telegraph offices. Red Guards infiltrated the Winter Palace, home of the provisional government where its anxious ministers were holed up. Late into the night, the government surrendered, with little bloodshed as the state's guards offered almost no resistance.

Announcements plastered throughout Russia notified people of the old regime's disintegration and the tenuous creation of a new one. Nobody understood exactly what it meant, but in the days and weeks and months to come, it became clearer that this fledgling reign would extract a great price from those who sought to undermine it, challenge it, or who were, by definition, in conflict with its tenets.

According to the recollections of Vladimir Smirnov, his family, like the majority of wealthy capitalists, fell into that latter category. After the revolution, which he described to his wife as “a dark cloud,” the Smirnovs were “denounced as enemies of the people.”
¹⁶
Vladimir fled south with Valentina to a resort town near Pyatigorsk. Full of spas, hot mineral springs, and other leisurely pleasures, it was a beautiful region to which many affluent Russians had retreated. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the town had been a refuge of sorts, where the rich and famous came to restore their weary bodies and nurse their bruised souls. Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Chekhov had all escaped at one time or another to this green, mountainous paradise. The home and resting place of one of Russia's most famous poets, Mikhail Lermontov, the quaint town was approximately 1,440 miles from tumultuous Petrograd and, most importantly, not yet under the control of the Bolsheviks. Vladimir and Valentina rented a nice home and settled in, figuring they would be safe there. They were wrong.

T
he Smirnovs tasted firsthand the bitterness the new Russia served up. The Bolsheviks declared that all private property belonged to the people, including factories, private homes, churches, vacant lands, and even stud farms like Vladimir's. In addition, the state decreed that Russia's dusty social infrastructure would be no more. Overnight, the Smirnovs and others like them were stripped of their privileged standing. Titles ranging from prince to noble to merchant to peasant were hurled into obscurity. From then on, everyone was simply a citizen of the Russian Republic.

This new social order, or lack of it, elicited great fear and confusion from the upper classes. For almost everyone else, it represented liberation, albeit a complicated one. Lenin, sticking to his message, pushed hard to galvanize the pent-up frustrations of the masses. For too long, they had been downtrodden and oppressed, and now it was their turn to rise, he argued. He encouraged them to see wealth as an unforgivable sin, capitalism as a self-serving evil.
The collective good was what mattered most, and true virtue was the result of honest labor and shared prosperity. With the Bolsheviks running things, workers and peasants would finally have land and an equal say in matters ranging from economics to justice. The Marxist talk was intoxicating and dangerous.

In the ensuing months, virtual anarchy took hold of the country. The chaos stemmed from a variety of causes, including the hugely unpopular war with Germany and a continuing shortage of almost every basic need. Hunger gnawed at the majority of citizens. A lack of fuel and electricity stalled large swaths of the country's transportation network. Disease spread, too, as a dearth of medical supplies, personnel, and services overwhelmed an already crippled health care system. Severe unemployment gripped several pockets of Russia, as factories and once-prosperous retailers and restaurants stood idle. Angst was all that was plentiful. “Moscow and the other Bolshevik cities at this time were more drab than usual. Shops were closed, the streetcars rare or non-existent…public buildings were un-heated and poorly illuminated, people died in offices and on the streets.”
¹

The misery was indiscriminate. According to statements made by Eugeniya's grandson, Boris Aleksandrovich Smirnov, members of the once prominent vodka dynasty lived in a state of constant anxiety. “It was a very sad and sorry time,” he recalled decades later in legal proceedings. “Everything had shut down and you couldn't buy anything. All the stores were boarded up. The well-to-do people would exchange antiques, antique furniture, just to get hold of a bag of flour.” His mother, Tatiana Petrovna Smirnova, was pregnant with Boris in Moscow during the revolution. About a week after Lenin's takeover, she went into labor. She could not find a carriage or tram or car to help her. “In order to give birth, she had to walk across Moscow on foot to…go to the hospital. There was no transport. There was nothing left.”
²

Lenin knew his grip on the country was fragile and that he needed to maintain order, consolidate power, and instill obedience. To that end, he created the Cheka in December 1917, formally known as the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. It was the government's secret police force, entrusted with snuffing out opposition groups by any means necessary. Its often-bloodthirsty mercenaries executed, tortured, or imprisoned anyone suspected of lacking complete faith in the new power. The Cheka took on the task of ridding Russia of its Romanovs, shooting to death the tsar, his captive wife and children, and some servants in a cellar in July 1918. To ensure that no evidence of this massacre survived, they took the bodies of their victims to an abandoned mine. After showering them with sulfuric acid, they dropped what remained down a mineshaft before burying the mutilated remains nearby.
^*

Although high-ranking officials from the Imperial Palace were among the first to suffer under the new order, ordinary citizens often fared no better. The Cheka, along with members of the Red Army, raided private homes, rummaging through drawers, desks, and closets, confiscating valuables and whatever else they found to their liking, including liquor reserves. Indeed, the looting of wine cellars, known as wine pogroms, was a particularly daunting problem for Lenin and his anti-alcohol comrades. Angry mobs would crash into warehouses that stored alcohol reserves, sparking drunken orgies that could last for days. Cellars in the Winter Palace were raided along with some 570 other storage facilities in Petrograd alone, despite the enduring prohibition. “Soldiers and civilians alike rocked Petrograd with a series of riots sparked by struggles over control of liquor supplies.”
³
This unrestrained lunacy lasted for weeks
until the Bolsheviks issued an order proclaiming that anyone participating in the wine pogroms would be killed on the spot. “People were shot as if they were wild wolves,” remarked Maxim Gorkiy in one of a series of articles he published about events between 1917 and 1918.
⁴

It was not just those who were caught in acts of wrongdoing who suffered. The Bolsheviks seized suspected infidels on a whim, sometimes rousing them from their beds. No investigations, evidence, or formal trials were needed or expected. Eugeniya's grandson, Boris, believed his father had vanished in this fashion. He never knew much about him, except that his name was Aleksander. Shortly after his birth, recounted Boris, his father “disappeared, he was arrested. Nobody knows what became of him…it was presumed he was shot. A lot of people got shot around that time.”
⁵
The same destiny awaited Vasiliy Bostanzhoglo, the wealthy merchant and former lover of Smirnov's youngest daughter, Aleksandra. He was also the father of her son, Vadim, Smirnov's grandson. He was reportedly shot in his factory during a routine raid by the Cheka, which was hunting for valuables believed to be hidden there.
⁶

Daily life became a series of unexpected, often unexplained confrontations, especially for the formerly privileged. “The war on private wealth was a bloody purgatory on the way to a heaven on earth.”
⁷
A great many homes owned by Smirnovs, like so many others, were subdivided. People from all walks of life moved in, taking up residence alongside aristocrats. In the home of Smirnov's youngest son, Aleksey, for instance, as many as fifteen people from one family could live alongside him and his family, shattering the comfortable life he and other members of the upper crust once cultivated.

The nationalization initiative, which saw thousands of private enterprises either abandoned by distraught owners or taken over by force by government bureaucrats, came on the heels of this chaos. The Smirnov vodka business was no exception. It
was unceremoniously torn from the family—no Smirnov would ever play a role in its future management or operation. The 1918 order read: “All the stores of grape wine, cognac, flavored vodka and related to them, rum, liquor, fruit drinks etc…. are announced to be property of the Moscow Soviet of Peasant and Working Deputies…. All the warehouses where these products are kept, all the equipment related to the industry, i.e., glass, boxes, covering material, dressing and fuel; also cash money in the wine shops and warehouses belong to the company and to [private persons]…now belong to the Moscow Soviet of Peasant and Working Deputies.”
⁸

Instead of vodka, which was still outlawed, the factory began producing and selling vinegar made from sour, overaged wine, and berry drinks. Just fifteen workers, who petitioned to nationalize this department for fear of becoming an orphaned enterprise, were left to run this business. The former liquor empire also began producing an herbal, alcohol-based liquid sold as a remedy for digestive problems, though it was also drinkable. Grape wines, because of their weak alcohol content, continued to be produced at one of Smirnov's facilities. Comrade Mikhailov, a longtime Smirnov loyalist, oversaw the operation with the help of roughly three dozen employees. The Smirnov name, along with its Imperial distinctions, remained a fixture on all these products until the early 1920s. It was then that Lenin banned use of pre-revolutionary brands and awards, such as the state coats of arms and the status of having been purveyor to the tsar.

Smirnov's warehouses, still stuffed with bottles of flavored vodkas and other liqueurs, presented an unusual problem. Laws prohibited moving the inventory without special permission from local authorities. It also could not be sold. It is unknown exactly what happened to these remnants. Most likely, they were destroyed, confiscated by corrupt officials, or sealed off from the public. Whatever transpired, the closure seemed to have ended forever Smirnov's reign as Russia's vodka king.

It was a story repeated again and again. During this time at least 37,000 private enterprises were nationalized by the Bolsheviks, which became known as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The drive left Russians from all classes without homes, without jobs, and, sometimes, without their lives. Sergey Chetverikov, a leading Russian scientist, recalled an eerie vision he had one day while brushing snow from a railroad track in early 1918. His work was part of the Bolshevik's forced labor initiative. In the distance, he made out the figure of Arseniy Ivanovich Morozov, a leading member of one of Moscow's most prominent industrial families. He seemed to be wandering through the snow aimlessly, having just been evicted from his own spacious mansion and factory. Chetverikov saw that Morozov was clutching a family icon, the one thing he had managed to salvage before his banishment. “The fate of the leading lights of merchant Moscow at the hands of the Bolsheviks was truly wretched,” wrote James L. West in his book,
Merchant Moscow
. “As arrests of prominent capitalists mounted in 1918 and nationalization decrees cascaded down from the Bolshevik regime, the once-proud captains of Russian industry were torn from the charmed lives they had known and thrust toward almost unimaginable extremes of human experience as prisoners, fugitives, refugees, and émigrés.”
⁹

For her part, Eugeniya was helpless to stop the government's heavy-handed takeover. Businesses that did not adjust or acquiesce to the new realities often ceased to exist. Besides, Eugeniya seems to have gambled that the Bolshevik's tenure in office would be short-lived. Like many in her class, she viewed Lenin and his cohorts as a temporary fix, a stepping stone to some other regime that would eventually return Russia to glory. She did not foresee her own poverty or that of her family. How else could she have justified leaving her children and her homeland behind shortly after the revolution? Eugeniya left Russia to join her new husband, Italian Marquis de la Valle Ricci, who was
then stationed in Japan. “She took a little money but, of course, it was more or less worthless money,” recalled her grandson, Boris. “They had a great deal of money in the Credit Lyonnais Bank in Moscow. When they went to a branch of the Credit Lyonnais bank in Japan, and then subsequently in France, they were told that all had been lost because of the revolution.”
¹⁰

The wrenching realities were disheartening. For some, they were also electrifying. In the months that passed, the disenfranchised, the displaced, and the disillusioned mobilized themselves into what became the White Army. They formed in locales throughout the empire, including the region near Pyatigorsk, the resort area to which Vladimir and Valentina had fled. These were the Russians who did not necessarily favor a return to the past, but they wanted something more democratic and humane than what the Bolsheviks were delivering. And they were willing to fight for it.

Lenin made good on his promise to end the war with Germany, but the treaty he signed had been costly, requiring Russia to sacrifice huge chunks of its territory, including the entire nation of Poland. He also empowered and equalized his people, or so they thought. These moves did little to quiet the rumblings of the opposition. Lenin and Trotskiy, who were amassing a new Red Army with thousands of trained officers culled from the tsar's own military, understood this discontent. Civil war, it was clear, was upon them.

 

P
YATIGORSK
(“
FIVE MOUNTAINS
”) was a refuge. The quaint, chic city in the southern part of Russia was located in a lush green valley surrounded by a protective chain of mountains. The mineral waters flowing through this region in the Caucuses had restored the health and psyche of Russians for more than a century. Now, it offered its newest inhabitants a similar restoration, but this time it was the healing of souls tormented by the
violent outbursts that raged in the Russia's cities. Vladimir and Valentina enjoyed the tranquil countryside in the dacha they now shared. Their new neighbors, some of whom included the ex-minister of finance Vladimir Kokovtsov and prima ballerina Mathilde Kshesinskaya, did as well. Still, they all must have known that the serenity they had discovered would be fleeting.

The Bolsheviks seized power in Pyatigorsk and its environs in the spring of 1918. They did not immediately impose their harsh reprisals, so life went along relatively peacefully. Valentina entertained former nobles as well as the newly appointed local leadership, providing her and Vladimir with some much-needed income. More importantly, it ingratiated Valentina with officials who not only enjoyed her performances but also appreciated her enormous charms. Valentina, Vladimir's third wife wrote, “was beyond suspicion since she gave concerts for the Red Army [meaning Bolsheviks].”
¹¹

Still, news of unrest and chaos elsewhere reached the residents living in and around Pyatigorsk. Each reported incident of brutality pierced the calm, protective shell that shrouded the community. Vladimir and Valentina, who resided in Yessentuki, a town nine miles west of Pyatigorsk, had lost everything they had not taken with them. Their home, furnishings, clothes, and keepsakes all disappeared, disbursed into the hands of ravenous strangers. Vladimir's prized thoroughbred, Pylyuga, described by a well-known Russian writer as “an adorable gray-steel he-horse,” was bludgeoned to death by a raucous, club-swinging crowd. It was part of a senseless slaughter of animals throughout the country, explained away as acts of revenge against their greedy, capitalist owners.