vodka has ventured from contentious origins in eastern Europe to become the world’s most popular, bestselling spirit. Vodka’s rise to global prominence is based largely on its versatility and ease of manufacture. “Vodka is unlike other forms of alcohol in that there is no justifiable excuse for drinking it,” claims Russian writer Viktor Erofeev. “The Frenchman will praise the aroma of cognac, and the Scotsman will laud the flavor of whiskey. Vodka, however, is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. At the same time, it is an acrid and irritating drink.” But since it is the outcome rather than the process that is important, Erofeev claims, “You might as well inject vodka into your bloodstream as drink it.”
While many prefer to drink vodka “neat”—often, as Erofeev suggests, in one gulp, grimacing and swearing—its versatility as a relatively flavorless, colorless, odorless spirit has made vodka the basis for all manner of cocktails and mixed drinks: Martinis and Bloody Marys, Screwdrivers, Cosmopolitans, Moscow Mules, Black Russians, White Russians, and Vodka Tonics. See Bloody Mary; Cosmopolitan; Martini; Moscow Mule; and White Russian. As a product of continuous stills, distilled to very high purity and filtered to even higher, vodka has little to gain from aging in wood. While—pace Erofeev—it does have its nuances, its subtle bouquets, its hints of terroir and craft, they are but lightly engraved on its surface. With vodka served at room temperature, a trained palate will be able to perceive them; served straight from the freezer, as is common, or stirred up into a Dry Martini, they will be very faint indeed; mixed with tomato juice and lemon juice; Tabasco and Worcestershire, they will all but disappear. In more recent years, vodka manufacturers have found this versatility a virtue, by marketing vodkas with added flavors. Some of these, such as lemon and hot pepper, are traditional: Russians have a long tradition of flavoring their vodka. Others, such as chocolate, donut, bacon, and even salmon, are not.
Traditional vodka is distilled from a fermented mash of rye, wheat, potatoes, or molasses from sugar beets native to eastern Europe and the Baltic region. However, as its popularity has grown, distillers have taken to using any starchy or sugary plant matter: corn, rice, fruit, sorghum, soybeans, or just sugar. Even milk has been used. Whatever the raw material, it is fermented and then distilled in continuous stills to the highest proof that can be practically achieved, generally coming off the still at between 95 and 97 percent pure ethanol, beyond which alcohol cannot easily be separated from water. See azeotrope. This spirit is then filtered through charcoal, silver, or one of a number of other substances. See
1934: the first shipment of vodka from the Soviet Union arrives in New York. Unfortunately, the glass the 100%-wheat vodka was bottled in proved too fragile for American commercial use and the “Genuine Imported Russian Vodka” brand was not a success.
Getty Images.
Contested Origins
Much of the history of vodka is shrouded in mystery, misinformation, and unverified legend—no more so than the question of vodka’s origins. When and where “vodka” originated has become a matter of national pride, especially between Russians and Poles: both lay claim to their “little water”: водка in Russian, wódka in Polish. Both view vodka as a defining trait of what it means to be Russian or Polish, and both associate the advent of vodka with the beginnings of the nation itself.
Like many other spiritous beverages, vodka traces its history back to medieval alchemists of the twelfth century who distilled grape wine lees to make medicinal elixirs. But how—and when—did the knowledge of distillation move from the monasteries of pre-Renaissance Italy to the imperial court of Moscow?
The most likely scenario takes a southern route from the Italian city-state of Genoa, beginning around 1290 ce. The seafaring Genoese had a monopoly on commerce in the Black Sea, including the bustling port city of Caffa (present-day Feodosia) on the Crimean Peninsula. When Caffa was sacked by the Mongol Khan Tamerlane in 1395, Genoese merchants, alchemists, and even ambassadors fled north through Muscovy, bringing medicinal aqua vitae with them. The monasteries of Moscow were fertile grounds for this new practice, as monks quickly transformed this Genoese art of distilling wine into aqua vitae into a product—vodka—that could be distilled from local produce: not grapes but grains (primarily rye and wheat) and soft spring water. Another theory holds that distillation came to Russia through long-established trade routes of the Hanseatic League in Pskov and Novgorod, near the Baltic Sea. Imported wines had been documented along this route as far back as 1436, though no record was made of aqua vitae, much less “vodka” as we know it today. Armchair historians in Russia claim that vodka actually arrived in Novgorod hundreds of years earlier—in the 1250s—because ancient birch-bark documents from that era contain a word that looks vaguely like “vodka” in Russian. Professional archaeologists and linguists have roundly debunked such claims. Others hypothesize that Russians learned distillation independently from the Tatars of Asia in the sixteenth century. One Mongolian technique calls for leaving a fermented mash out in subzero weather: when the water freezes, the ice can be removed, leaving concentrated liquid alcohol. Yet not only were such indigenous experimentations dependent on the season, but they also left highly concentrated fusel oils, which are often fatal. But the Mongols also knew distillation by fire, with the simple but effective “Mongolian still,” in which alcoholic vapors from boiling wash condensed on the bottom of a bowl full of cold water and were caught in a cup. See still, pot. Through whichever route, anyway, by the early sixteenth century the alchemists’ aqua vitae had already taken root in Muscovy as “burnt wine”—the spiritous beverage we might recognize today as polugar, or pot-still vodka. The Polish claim to vodka is only slightly clearer. Beginning in the thirteenth century, a number of Polish physicians studied alchemy in the medical schools of Salerno and Montpellier, before returning to the Kingdom of Poland. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the curriculum of Jagiellonian University in Krakow included Latin essays on distilling “burning water” (aqua ardente). The term wódka first appeared in Polish court documents in 1405, though likely referring to distilled medicines, whereas gorzałka was first mentioned in Joannes Murmelius’s 1528 dictionary, becoming the primary term for all distilled beverages for much of Polish history. By the sixteenth century—both in Poland and in Russia—distilled spirits had become widespread as an acceptable beverage, though not yet an object of widespread consumption, although Sigmund von Heberstein, the Austrian ambassador to Muscovy in the 1510s and 1520s, found that the nobles of the Russian court “at the beginning of the meal always drank aqua vitae.” Unfortunately, Heberstein describes this spirit no further. See
Vodka’s Rise
Vodka became the national drink of both Poland and the Russian Empire only gradually. In premodern times, Poles and Russian drank fermented beer, wine, ale, mead, and kvas (a low-alcohol drink made from fermented bread), similar to peasants across Europe. The shift away from mildly alcoholic fermented beverages to the more potent distilled vodka has less to do with culture and more with economic and political decisions associated with the expansion of the Muscovite empire, as vodka was the perfect vehicle for indirect taxation.
When, in 1552, Ivan the Terrible (r. 1533–1584) defeated the rival Khanate of Kazan on the Volga River, he was impressed with the system of government-run taverns the Tatars called kabak and decreed that Russia should have them too, so that all profits from the liquor trade were funneled into the new tsar’s treasury. In Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591), English ambassador Giles Fletcher wrote: “In every great towne of his Realme he hath a Caback or drinking house, where is sold aquavitæ (which they cal Russewine) mead, beere, &c. Out of these hee receiveth rent that amounteth to a great summe of money… . You shall have manie there that have drunk all away to the verie skinne, and so walk naked (whom they call Naga.) While they are in the Caback, none may call them foorth whatsoever cause there be, because he hindereth the Emperours revenue.” And a significant revenue it was. The Law Code of 1649, which formalized serfdom, also outlawed buying or selling vodka beyond the kabak under penalty of torture. The tavern keepers (or tselovalniki: “kissers” who swore an allegiance to the tsar by kissing the Orthodox cross) could not refuse even a habitual drunkard, lest the tsar’s revenue be diminished. Since their lucrative positions depended on generating ever more revenue for the state, tavern keepers and administrators pushed more potent distilled vodkas over fermented beers and meads since the profit margins were so much higher. In time, the tavern became the means by which the Russian state exploited its own people: the sole purveyor of a potent and addictive substance that generated widespread misery for the peasantry but also enormous profits for the state. Within a generation, the traditionally self-sufficient Russian village had been obliterated—replaced with an entire system of gentry distillers, merchants, and government bureaucrats that propagated and profited from the peasants’ drunkenness. While the system produced widespread impoverishment, systemic corruption, and entrenched autocratic governance, it was also a boon for the early tsarist empire. As Moscow’s capacity to extract resources grew, so too did its capacity to build its military, expand, and ultimately broadcast its power across vast swaths of Eurasia, ultimately becoming the largest empire on earth. Vodka runs like a red thread through the fabric of Russian history. Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1696–1725) had a herculean appetite for vodka and took great pleasure in forcing subordinates and foreign dignitaries to drink for his amusement. The penalty for violating Peter’s bacchanalian code of conduct during days-long drunken banquets was the “Great Eagle”: a massive, ornate goblet filled with 1.5 liters of vodka, to be consumed on the spot. Revelers often had to be carried home; more than a few died from alcohol poisoning. Empress Catherine the Great (r. 1762–1796) came to power by means of a palace coup, deposing her husband, Peter III, who was a drunken imbecile. It helped that she bribed the military with promises of vodka—something that would become a tradition for aspirants to the throne. Meanwhile, the empire itself became ever more dependent on vodka revenues, becoming the state’s single largest source of income by the nineteenth century, comprising nearly one-third of the budget of the mighty Russian Empire. Inspired by American and European temperance efforts, in 1858–1859 peasants in the annexed Polish and Baltic provinces—and later the Russian heartland—began taking pledges of abstinence from vodka. While the taverns emptied and the health of the population improved, the corrupt vodka-tax administrators went bankrupt, imperiling the financial stability of the Russian treasury itself. Eventually, the army had to be called in to suppress the sobriety rebellion, forcing peasants to drink, beating and arresting those who refused.
Those efforts could only be overridden by a command from the autocrat himself, which has only happened twice, both times ending in political disaster. In 1914, at the outset of World War I, heavy drinker turned temperance convert Tsar Nicholas II (ruled 1894–1917) decreed a prohibition on vodka to facilitate the war effort, making Russia the world’s first prohibition country. Unfortunately, getting rid of the single largest source of revenue during the greatest war the world had yet seen turned out to be a bad idea. They tried to paper over the gaping hole in the budget by simply printing more rubles. The resulting hyperinflation crippled the Russian economy and fanned the flames of social revolution that would consume the empire itself. The same pattern would repeat itself later in the twentieth century. Vladimir Lenin (r. 1917–1924) was a principled prohibitionist who refused to bring back vodka and its concordant economic subjugation, despite widespread homebrewing. See samogon. His successor, the heavy-drinking Joseph Stalin (r. 1924–1953), had no such qualms and in 1925 revived the vodka monopoly as the financial foundation for his totalitarian industrialization. By the 1970s, vodka revenues again constituted a quarter of the revenues of the Soviet superpower. When he came to power in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev instituted the sweeping reforms of perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (free speech), but only after he initiated an anti-alcohol campaign in the name of labor productivity, once again blowing a massive hole in the state budget. The Soviets tried to paper over the shortfall in vodka revenues by printing more rubles, which exacerbated the hyperinflation and fueled widespread discontent, and soon the Soviet empire itself fell to revolution. The tension between state finance and the welfare of the Russian population has bedeviled the post-Soviet administrations of both Boris Yeltsin (1992–2000) and Vladimir Putin (2000–present).
Vodka as Global Commodity
Vodka’s international domination was a relatively recent development. Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution, and the resulting civil war and famines of the 1920s, set many Russian gentry distillers to flight, and they took vodka with them. It was in one community of Russian exiles in France where American cowboy philosopher Will Rogers first encountered vodka, and he struggled to explain it to his fellow Americans: “How they can concentrate so much insensibility into one prescription is almost a chemical wonder,” Rogers recounted. “One tiny sip of this Vodka poison and it will do the same amount of material damage to mind and body that an American strives for for hours [sic].”
It was in France that Vladimir Smirnov—exiled son of the former vodka purveyor to the tsars, Pyotr Smirnov—met with the Russian-born American entrepreneur Rudolph Kunett, whose family had supplied grains to the Smirnov distillery in pre-revolutionary Russia. Smirnov sold the American émigré the rights to market vodka in the United States under the name Pierre Smirnoff & Sons, with initial production beginning in Bethel, Connecticut, following the repeal of prohibition. See Smirnoff. Yet it was only in the 1950s that Smirnoff vodka sales took off, thanks largely to a slick advertising campaign showcasing Hollywood celebrities. In the first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), Sean Connery famously ordered a martini “shaken, not stirred” with Smirnoff vodka. Its iconic position in Hollywood propelled Smirnoff into a globally recognized brand by the 1970s, and vodka as a dominant liquor, outselling rum, gin, and bourbon both in the United States and around the world. Smirnoff was joined by Explorer and Absolut from Sweden, which began to be aggressively marketed as vodkas rather than traditional brännvin (burnt wine), harking back to those early European origins. See Absolut. American and European vodkas largely did not have to contend with competition from vodkas produced in the Soviet Union or the countries of the Warsaw Pact, with the exception of Stolichnaya. In 1972, the Pepsi-Cola Company struck a barter deal with the Soviet government to exclusively market “Stoli” in the West, in exchange for making Pepsi the first American consumer product sold widely in the Soviet Union. See
See also Russia and Eastern Europe and starka.
Christian, David. Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1990.
Erofeev, Victor. “The Russian God.” New Yorker, December 16, 2002.
Fletcher, Giles. Of the Russe Common Wealth. 1591; repr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.
Heberstein, Sigmund von. Rerum moscoviticarum comentarii. Amsterdam: 1527.
Himelstein, Linda. The King of Vodka: The Story of Pyotr Smirnov and the Upheaval of an Empire. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Rodionov, Boris V. Bol’shoi obman: Pravda i lozh’ o russkoi vodke. Moscow: ACT, 2011.
Rogers, Will. There’s Not a Bathing Suit in Russia and Other Bare Facts. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927.
Schrad, Mark Lawrence. Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Simpson, Scott. “History and Mythology of Polish Vodka: 1270–2007.” Food and History 8, no. 1 (2010): 121–148.
By: Mark L. Schrad
1934: the first shipment of vodka from the Soviet Union arrives in New York. Unfortunately, the glass the 100%-wheat vodka was bottled in proved too fragile for American commercial use and the “Genuine Imported Russian Vodka” brand was not a success. Source: Getty Images.