Eagle, I don't want to form an alliance anymore.

Two men in overalls jumped off the truck and walked toward the farm chairman, one of them holding a document.

"Comrade, this is a notice from the district committee regarding the anti-alcohol campaign," the person handing the document to the farm chairman. "According to instructions from higher authorities, it is necessary to remove all grape-growing facilities within the jurisdiction—"

"These are 100-year-old vines!" the farm chairman's voice suddenly rose. "This isn't some kind of planting facility; it's the culmination of six generations of our hard work! The order from Moscow is about restricting spirits, not destroying vineyards! Wine isn't spirits!"

"Comrade, instructions from above—"

"You were ordered by your superiors to uproot a hundred-year-old grapevine? Which superior? Bring him here and let him see for himself what he's destroying!"

The members of the surrounding farms began to gather. For these people who had relied on grape growing for generations, destroying the vineyards meant destroying their livelihoods and the legacy left by their ancestors.

Several elderly people began speaking loudly in Hungarian. Although Slava couldn't understand them, he could sense the despair and anger emanating from their very bones from their tone and gestures.

The tractor had reached the edge of the vineyard, and the driver was waiting for the two workers in work clothes to give him a signal.

Slava stood in front of the row of century-old black vines.

He glanced at the vines behind him, which had already sprouted tender green leaves.

Each vine is like a life that has lived for a hundred years. They have survived the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, two world wars, the Soviet Union's collectivization movement, and lived through the Tsar, Hitler, and Stalin. Now they are to be crushed by a Soviet-made tractor because someone in an office in Moscow wrote a resolution on restricting spirits, and that resolution, in its journey here, turned into the uprooting of all the vineyards!

PS: The destruction of the vineyards was initiated by Ligachev, and Gotto agreed. The destruction of the core vineyard industry led to a sharp increase in internal conflicts in Ukraine. Later, when the situation in Ukraine became too serious, the blame was shifted to Ligachev and Ryzhkov.

Slava walked up to the tractor and stood facing the bulldozer blade, less than three meters away.

His 1.6-meter height made him appear exceptionally short in front of that enormous machine, like a nail driven into an iron mountain.

"Stop it! You bastard!"

The driver leaned out of the driver's window and looked at the short man who had suddenly appeared in front of him. His expression changed from confusion to unease.

He didn't know Slava, but he could tell from the nervous reactions of his entourage and the expressions on the faces of the well-dressed attendants that this man was of high rank.

“Party cadres must serve the people!” Slava’s voice grew louder at the second sentence.

He was speaking to the two men with documents behind the tractor, to the farm members who had gathered around, and to the hundred-year-old vineyard that shimmered green in the May sun.

“The central government’s directives are never meant to be passed on to local officials at every level. If you’re going to destroy people’s property so brutally, then you’ll have to run over me first!”

Everyone was stunned.

The driver took his hands off the control stick; of course, he dared not let the tracks run over the Central Secretary!

The two men in work clothes carrying documents looked at each other in bewilderment. Their administrative rank was probably that of a clerk in the district committee. Encountering someone from the central government in this situation was like an infantry phalanx running head-on into a tank charge.

"I, Ivanov, Secretary of the Agricultural Secretariat of the Central Committee of the CPSU! On behalf of the Central Committee, I demand that you immediately cease this eradication. This vineyard is the property of the people, not the private property of you local secretaries. The Central Committee's resolution is aimed at restricting the sale of spirits, not ordering you to destroy the livelihoods of generations of ordinary people!"

"Who is your district secretary? Bring him here!"

He turned to the farm members who had gathered around. The Hungarian and Ukrainian farmers stared at him in disbelief.

The idea of ​​a cadre from Moscow standing in front of a bulldozer and speaking up for them was something they had never experienced before!

“Comrades, I will get justice for you,” he said. “Please believe me.”

The farm chairman stood in the crowd, looking at Slava, his eyes reddening. He whispered something in Hungarian.

Slava couldn't understand, but a young man next to him who spoke Hungarian translated for him:

He said, "Thank you, Comrade Secretary."

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

That evening, Slava returned to his temporary lodgings in Uzhhorod, and the first thing he did was dial a Moscow number.

The person on the other end of the phone was Ligachev.

"Yegor Kuzmich Ligachev!"

Slava's suppressed anger was still clearly discernible through thousands of kilometers of cable.

"I almost watched a bulldozer flatten a hundred-year-old vineyard today in Transcarpathia. Tell me—what on earth happened?!"

Chapter 50 Soviet Democracy! (8K)

Ligachev remained silent on the other end of the phone, seemingly stunned by Slava's barrage of questions.

"Ivanov, I know what you saw in Ukraine. But first, you need to understand why Solomentsev and I are pushing this movement..."

The answer to this question requires starting with one of the deepest wounds in Soviet society.

The Soviet Union at present is a country that is drinking itself to death.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the two decades from the 1960s to the early 1980s, the Soviet Union’s per capita alcohol consumption nearly doubled!

The average adult male drinks more than 14 liters of pure alcohol per year—while the global average is about 5 to 6 liters. And this is only the amount of legal purchases that are recorded. If we include the amount of bootlegging that is found in rural and urban areas, the actual figure may be 3 to 4 liters higher.

For a normal person, let alone pure alcohol, it's questionable whether they can even drink five liters of beer with less than 10% alcohol per year. In the neighboring Slavic region, the average person drinks twenty liters of pure alcohol!

What does this mean? It means that an average adult male in the Soviet Union would drink one and a half bottles of vodka every two days.

Drink on weekends, drink on holidays, drink after receiving your salary, drink even if your salary is deducted, drink when you get married, drink when you get divorced, drink when you have a baby, drink even if you can't have a baby, and drink even if your child fails an exam!

Behind this number lies a large number of deaths.

The average life expectancy of Soviet men fell from about 66 years in 1965 to 62 years in the early 1980s. Such a decline in life expectancy in a large industrialized country is almost unparalleled in peacetime!

At least 40,000 people die directly from alcohol poisoning each year, and indirect deaths caused by alcoholism, such as workplace accidents, traffic accidents, domestic violence, and crimes, are an even bigger black hole that no one dares to seriously count.

The rate of birth defects is significantly higher in areas with severe alcoholism, and there is a positive correlation between the defect rate and alcohol consumption in factories.

KGB internal reports had repeatedly warned of this problem as early as the Andropov era.

A KGB report in 1982 indicated that:

"Alcoholism is biologically wiping out the Russian nation's labor force."

Whether it's the medical community, the sociological community, or the military, all sectors are conveying the same message to Moscow through different channels:

Do something, General Secretary!

The Soviet authorities launched and implemented anti-alcohol campaigns of varying scales on several occasions, but the results were not very good.

The most recent campaign occurred during the Andropov era, when severe punishments for drinking at work became part of a series of measures to strengthen discipline.

At the same time, the cheapest Soviet vodka, "Moscovskaya," began production, costing 4 rubles and 70 kopeks.

Ironically, this cheap vodka is affectionately known as "Andropovka" by the grateful people.

The consensus now that something must be done is widespread within the Politburo—from the most conservative Tikhonov to the most radical Yakovlev, there is no disagreement on this point.

But what to do, how to do it, and to what extent?

Yegor Ligachev and Mikhail Solomyantsev were the most enthusiastic in the party to promote a new round of anti-alcohol campaigns. They proposed reducing vodka production by 10% annually, organizing anti-alcohol associations nationwide, and restricting alcohol sales.

Other party members proposed returning to the experience of the Brezhnev era, which involved raising the price of spirits, reducing their production, and compensating by increasing the production of wine and beer.

However, the Council of Ministers opposed the campaign because alcohol tax accounts for a large proportion of the coalition's tax revenue, and if revenue drops sharply, the resulting budget shortfall will be impossible to make up!

“Ivanov, I’ve been working on prohibition in Tomsk for seventeen years. Trust me, we can do it!” Ligachev said on the phone.

His confidence comes from his practice.

"Do you know what I did there? I restricted sales hours, established sober work competitions, and conducted alcohol education in factories and schools... The results were real!"

Labor productivity in Tomsk increased during my term, workplace accident rates decreased, birth rates rose, divorce rates fell... If the whole Soviet Union could do what Tomsk did—”

“No, Yegor Kuzmich, listen to me, this place is different from Tomsk!” Slava interrupted him.

Although interrupting a Politburo member's speech is extremely impolite in a superior-subordinate relationship, he couldn't care less about manners at that moment:

"I fully support what you did in Tomsk. Restricting sales, raising prices, and providing alcohol education—these are all correct. But can you tell me what uprooting a hundred-year-old vineyard in Transcarpathia has to do with combating alcoholism? Those old vines produce 12-proof table wine, not 40-proof vodka!"

“Ivanov, this problem is more complicated than you think.”

Ligachev said, "You're right that the text of the resolution is aimed at vodka and brandy."

However, at the implementation level, we face a reality:

The Alliance market has a lot of cheap fortified wines, the kind called 'Bormotuha' (бормотуха, commonly known as 'dumb wine') – with an alcohol content of seventeen to twenty percent, almost like diluted vodka!

This stuff costs only one or two rubles a bottle, and it's mainly consumed by urban youth and lower-class alcoholics. Distinguishing between high-quality table wines and Bormotuha is virtually impossible at the grassroots level.

Do you expect a clerk in a district committee to be able to distinguish between Pinot Noir from Burgundy and inferior sweet wines blended by factories?

Therefore, Solomyantsev and I concluded that:

Instead of creating a finely detailed breakdown that grassroots staff can't execute, it's better to create a simple instruction that everyone can understand.

"The reality is that your 'simple instructions' are escalated layer by layer after they are passed down to the grassroots level!"

Slava's voice rose a little. He knew he was getting angry at a member of the Politburo, but at that moment his mind was filled with the image of the old Hungarian farm owner who had thanked him with red eyes that afternoon.

"Moscow says it's restricting spirits, the state interprets it as reducing all alcohol, the district interprets it as closing all retail outlets, and at the grassroots level it means uprooting vineyards!"

Do you know that viticulture is the backbone of the local economy in places like Transcarpathia, Crimea, and Kherson? You bulldozed the vineyards, fine, then what will those Hungarian and Romanian farmers eat? The crops they've cultivated for six generations will be gone in an afternoon!

Don't tell me farmers can switch to growing other things. You've worked in this bureaucratic, directive-based economy for so many years, don't you know how inefficient this system is? Farmers would have starved to death long ago.

Just like when Section Chief Ma was questioned by reporters about steel production back then, reducing overcapacity is a matter of survival, and maintaining overcapacity is also a matter of survival!

Faced with pressure from Moscow, local officials in Ukraine can only feign ignorance in this way:

"...This grape-growing industry...has a long history in Ukraine, and we have a large workforce in the industry..."

Moscow just left with a single sentence, leaving tens of thousands of hungry mouths to feed. Protecting the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people is no easy task!

Moreover, Slava is now a party cadre, and behind him are countless families; ensuring the well-being of the people is his responsibility.

He paused for a moment to calm his breathing.

"Yegor Kuzmich, have you looked at the data from France and Italy?"

France has one of the highest per capita wine consumption rates in the world, but its alcohol abuse rate is far lower than that of the Soviet Union.

Italians drink alcohol at the dinner table with their parents from a young age, but Italian men have a life expectancy that is a full twelve years longer than Soviet men. Why? Because they drink 12-proof table wine instead of 40-proof vodka.

Wine culture is precisely the antidote to spirits culture, not an accomplice.

Destroying the vineyards won't stop Russians from drinking a single drop less vodka, but it will deprive them of their only possible alternative. Then they'll drink antifreeze, shoe polish, and make their own liquor from sugar, and even more people will die.

Historically, it was precisely because of this failed prohibition order that sugar officially entered the rationing system in 1986, as many Slavs went to buy sugar to make illicit alcohol.

"Are you speaking on behalf of the alcohol?" Ligachev's tone became somewhat sharp.

In Ligachev's morality, speaking up for alcohol and speaking up for corruption are crimes of the same level.

“I’m speaking for common sense! I respect Andropov’s principles more than anyone else—he’s the one who got me out of Lubyanka, and I would never go and destroy his legacy.”

But being principled is not the same as being brutal. A policy that doesn't differentiate between 12-degree wine and 40-degree vodka is like a doctor who doesn't differentiate between a cold and pneumonia!

He may have good intentions, but his prescriptions could kill people, and have you considered that most of the wine regions in Transcarpathia and Crimea are inhabited by ethnic minorities? Clearing out vineyards there will not only cause economic problems, but also ethnic issues.

Hungarians, Romanians, Greeks... these people have been growing grapes for generations. You're bulldozing their traditions. What will they think of the alliance? What will they think of the party?

Is this how we, as students of our mentors and builders of communism, are meant to fulfill our mentors' ideals?

This last sentence struck a chord with what Ligachev truly cared about.

Ligachev was a sincere Leninist who firmly believed that the unity of the Soviet peoples was the foundation of the socialist cause, and that any behavior that might shake this unity was more dangerous to him than alcoholism itself.

In later historical studies, many scholars have considered wine culture to be a "marginal" culture in the Soviet Union.

Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, southern Ukraine... For Russia and Belarus, vodka culture is central.

Therefore, the political cost of this one-size-fits-all approach falls primarily on the peripheral republics, rather than on Russia itself.

At the time, Aliyev (representative of Azerbaijan) and Shevardnadze (representative of Georgia) both expressed their opposition in the Politburo, demanding the protection of the wine industry, but their demands were suppressed by the Ligachev-Sorometsev coalition.

The chairman of the Council of Ministers, Ryzhkov, wanted to object from a financial perspective, but he couldn't stop Ligachev.

Whether there was any Russian centrism in that decision back then is still debated in academic circles, but in terms of objective effects, the result is clear—local ethnic conflicts did indeed increase significantly.

There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.

"...What specific suggestions do you have?" Ligachev finally asked.

...

The next day, Slava presented his alternative in its entirety to Ligachev and Ryzhkov.

The proposed solution is relatively mild:

Strict restrictions are imposed on spirits (vodka, brandy, etc. with an alcohol content of 40% or higher), and price increases, shortened sales periods, and raising the age limit from 18 to 21 are all to be implemented.

Fortified, cheap sweet wines should be banned from production and sale because, in reality, this category is industrially produced waste with no value whatsoever.

There are no restrictions on natural wines (below 15 degrees), and they are even encouraged to be promoted as a substitute for spirits—along with policies to expand grape planting areas and improve winemaking techniques;