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Vodka Politics - Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,870
Discovery Miles 18 700
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Vodka Politics - Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (Hardcover)
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Russia is justly famous for its vodka. Today, the Russian average
drinking man consumes 180 bottles of vodka a year, nearly half a
bottle a day. But few people realize the enormous-and enormously
destructive-role vodka has played in Russian politics. In Vodka
Politics, Mark Schrad reveals that almost every Russian ruler has
utilized alcohol to strengthen his governing power and that
virtually every major event in Russian history has been tinged with
alcohol. The Tsars used alcohol to dampen dissent and exert control
over their courts, while the government's monopoly over its sale
has provided a crucial revenue stream for centuries. In one of the
book's many remarkable insights, Schrad shows how Tsar Nicholas
II's decision to ban alcohol in 1914 contributed to the 1917
revolution. After taking power, Stalin lifted the ban and once
again used mandatory drinking binges to keep his subordinates
divided, fearful, confused, and off balance. On such occasions, a
drunken Khrushchev routinely pushed the drunken Soviet Deputy
Defense Commissar Grigory Kulik into a nearby pond. Under Gorbachev
the pendulum swung back the other way, but his crackdown on alcohol
consumption in the 1980s backfired, exacerbating the Soviets'
fiscal crisis and hastening the 1991 collapse. Today, chronic
alcoholism has created a massive health crisis, and life
expectancies for men have fallen to an alarmingly low 59 as a
consequence. Schrad argues that Russia's storied addiction to vodka
is not simply a social problem, but a symptom of a deeper
sickness-autocracy. Indeed, Schrad shows that alcoholism and
autocracy have gone hand-in-hand throughout Russian history.
Drawing upon remarkable archival evidence and filled with colorful
anecdotes of the enforced drunkenness Russian leaders imposed on
their courts, Vodka Politics offers a wholly new way of
understanding Russian political history.
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