Saved by the Bottle

Mikhail Gorbachev drinks alcohol only on rare ceremonial occasions. When he toasts friends and dignitaries, it is nearly always with fruit juice. After he came to power, he curtailed vodka production to save his country from alcoholism. Ironically, that may have been the vice that saved him.

Former Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and then Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov were deep into the toasts at a party at Pavlov's dacha when they were suddenly summoned to the Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks."

That would not have been an unfamiliar situation for the Soviet Union. Gorbachev has been the nation's most abstemious leader. Stalin was a hard drinker, and Khrushchev was known for making hasty decisions under the influence of alcohol. Brezhnev and his entourage loved nothing better than raising glasses and toasting "Na zdorovye ((to your health))." As vodka once fueled communist rule, so it has hastened its downfall. The American poet John Ciardi, who died in 1986, wrote prophetically about vodka:

. . . Only a Russian can take

it straight, and only after long

conditioning, and just see what

seems to be coming of that!