Product Description

Savoured by peasants and Tsars, condemned by clerics and the architects of perestroika - vodka has been the joy and scourge of the Russian nation for centuries. But what are the origins of the Russians' favourite drink? Did vodka emerge as an authentic national discovery from the brewing-shops of the monasteries of medieval Russia, or was the secret of its preparation imported from elsewhere? When was it that people first experienced vodka's now famed property of 'knocking drinkers off their feet'? With formidable scholarship and considerable dry wit, William Pokhlebkin, one of Russia's best-known historians sets out on the detective trail. His aim: to reveal the strange truth about his country's most famous tipple. The result is a triumph of historical deduction. As he uncovers the social economic and technical background to the emergence of vodka, and indeed tells us how and with what the spirit should be drunk, the author creates and unconventional but true-to-life portrait of the society and society and social psychology that gave birth to today's Russia. He argues that those who have controlled the vodka stills have controlled the density of Russia - first the Boyars, then the Tsars, and in this century the Bolsheviks. In Pokhlebkin's view Gorbachev unwisely attempted to suppress vodka, allowing the Mafia to seize control of its production and distribution. Perestroika was thus doomed. Pokhlebkin believes that both prohibitionism and drunkenness are scourges which encourage one another. He insists that vodka itself doesn't make people drunk, only irresponsible and uncultured ways of consuming it. A History of Vodka is the work not only of a fine scholar but of a passionate advocate of the virtues of vodka and a stern critic of those who have misused it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #629289 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-22
• Original language: Russian
• Dimensions: 1.15 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

From Publishers Weekly
``This text was never intended for publication,'' Pokhlebkin solemnly warns us in his foreword. It is pretty much downhill from there, which is something of a shame, given the intriguing premise of the book. The author notes that he undertook writing this history as a ``civic duty'' when asked by the Russian government to establish the legitimacy of the Russians' claim to the invention of vodka. It seems that in the late 1970s, a number of countries began challenging not only whether Russia was indeed vodka's homeland, but even whether the nation's distilleries had a right to use the name vodka (the Russian diminutive for water) on their bottles of the colorless spirit. ``The laws of the world capitalist market are ruthless,'' Pokhlebkin reflects, ``they take neither emotion nor tradition into account.'' While convincing on the veracity of vodka's Russian heritage (it was invented, he says, between 1440 and 1478, probably in a Moscow monastery), he is such a humorless and ponderous writer that the book becomes unintentionally funny. Vodka should be imbibed straight, and only with ``exclusively Russian national dishes,'' Pokhlebkin intones. What about cocktails? ``Cocktails are merely a means of getting drunk, not a gastronomic category,'' he sniffs, ``and in any case Russians would never abuse vodka in this fashion.'' The reader is frequently reminded of a misguided Nabokov narrator--or perhaps of Greta Garbo's Ninotchka.

Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Alcohol has been a far more important part of human history than most historians have recognised, potent for good and ill. Russia has known it under the name of vodka, and has been second to no other country for feeling its influence. Anyone wanting to learn about how and where its distilling began, about how production became a monopoly of the nobility and finally of the government, and about how perestroika tried to put stop to alcoholism, and why it has failed, must turn to this very learned, very informative book." - Victor Kiernan

About the Author
William Pokhlebkin is a Fellow of the Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. His previous books include a history of tea-drinking, and a political history of Scandinavia.