In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was "vodka." In the vast but secluded expanse of Russia, vodka gives and vodka takes away. At the start of the twentieth century, a third of the Russian Army was supported by the excise duties paid on the Smirnov brand alone. At the same time, vodka has inflicted more suffering on the country than any war has. Some fourteen thousand Russian soldiers were killed during the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan, but more than thirty thousand Russians die of alcohol poisoning every year. The yearly consumption of alcohol is higher here than anywhere else in the world (almost four gallons of pure alcohol per capita, at least half of it in the form of vodka), and vodka has scarred virtually every family, just as the Second World War and the repressions of Stalin's regime did. (The only thing I know about my mother's father, for instance--other than that he divorced my grandmother soon after they were married--is that he was an alcoholic.) The very mention of the word "vodka" triggers unpredictable behavior in Russians. It seems to punch a hole directly into the subconscious, setting off a range of odd gestures and facial expressions. Some people wring their hands; some grin idiotically or snap their fingers; others sink into sullen silence. But no one, high or low, is left indifferent. More than by any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises; it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god. And, in 2003, that god will celebrate his five-hundredth birthday.

One day in the early nineteen-seventies, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was travelling back to Moscow from his government dacha in the village of Zavidovo. His driver that day was Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party. The two leaders were alone in the car, and Gromyko felt able to broach a sore subject. "Leonid Ilyich," he said, "something has to be done about vodka. The people are turning into alcoholics."

Brezhnev didn't answer. Five minutes later, Gromyko was regretting having raised the issue when Brezhnev suddenly replied, "Andrei, there's no way the Russian people can do without it."

I heard this anecdote from Mikhail Gorbachev--who had heard it from Gromyko himself--when I paid him a visit, earlier this year, to talk about the vodka anniversary. We sat in his sombre, English-style office on Leningrad Prospect, as his late wife, Raisa Maximovna, gazed down at us from a large oil portrait.

As everyone in Russia knows, Gorbachev disagreed with Brezhnev, and he became the only Russian leader in the history of vodka to launch a relentless campaign to eradicate it. "The statistics were appalling," he told me. "Injuries in the workplace, falling productivity, diminishing life expectancy, accidents on the roads and railways. In 1972, they discussed the problem in the Politburo, but deferred it. It was impossible to solve, because the state budget itself was 'drunk'--it relied on the income from vodka sales. Stalin set it up that way--temporarily, but there's nothing as permanent as a temporary decision. In Brezhnev's time, the 'drunken' component of the budget increased from a hundred billion rubles to a hundred and seventy billion--that was how much profit vodka brought to the state." He went on, "In the course of my career, I saw massive drunkenness in the Party. Brezhnev drank, especially at the beginning. Yeltsin even used the fact that he drank to attract women--'He's just the same as we are!' Women couldn't keep their hands out of his pants. But in the West they were afraid--he had his finger on the nuclear button."

In May of 1985, just two months after Gorbachev became the Party's General Secretary, he issued a decree entitled "On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism." He began his war on vodka by testing the public's commitment, with a survey that was carried out in two hundred of the country's leading factories. The factory workers responded that they were against prohibition but in favor of restrictions on the use of alcohol. In practice, however, the anti-alcohol campaign turned into one of Communism's typical "bureaucratic excesses." Gorbachev destroyed vodka factories; closed most liquor stores; banned the serving of alcohol at receptions in Soviet embassies abroad; and, finally, even bulldozed vineyards in the Crimea, Georgia, Moldavia, the Kuban, and Stavropol--all to the howls and moans of the drinking nation, which soon dubbed him "the mineral-water Secretary." Although the campaign, according to Gorbachev, led to "wives finally getting to see their husbands"--the birth rate rose, and so did life expectancy--some people started hoarding sugar to make moonshine, thereby creating an extreme sugar shortage. Others poisoned themselves with more dangerous intoxicants, including brake fluid. I remember, in those days, coming across a sign in a village store not far from Kostroma, near the northern end of the Volga: "Eau de cologne on sale from 2 P.M." In the restaurants in Kostroma itself, the waiters were surreptitiously serving liquor in teacups.

Perhaps because Gorbachev came from south Stavropol, an area of Russia where, atypically, people consume mostly wine, he had failed to appreciate the extent of vodka's psychological influence. In the nineteen-eighties, in a country where vodka had become a currency that was often more reliable than the ruble, and where drunkenness was a factor in more than seventy per cent of murders, vodka proved to be stronger than the power structures that Gorbachev had at his command. When he saw the poisoning statistics, he told me, he gave up. Perhaps the statistics had been distorted, in order to undermine his authority, he suggested bitterly. But then he laughed and told an old joke on himself: "There was this long line for vodka, and one poor guy couldn't stand it any longer. 'I'm going to the Kremlin, to kill Gorbachev,' he said. An hour later, he came back. The line was still there, and everyone asked him, 'Did you kill him?' 'Kill him!' he said. 'The line for that's even longer than this one!' "

Little has been recorded about the actual invention of vodka, and there is really nothing surprising in that: in Russia, vodka is thought of as a sacred and eternal substance, impervious to historical interpretation. In 1977, American vodka companies accused the Soviet distillers who were trying to make it in the U.S. market of "inauthenticity," and the ensuing commercial scandal lent some impetus to the study of vodka's history. But the cruellest blow was struck later that year, when Poland, at the time a faithful member of the Warsaw Pact, declared that vodka was really a Polish drink and that Russians had no right to use the name "vodka" for the alcohol they were producing. Alarmed Soviet functionaries searched for someone who could reconstruct the genesis of the drink and settled on a historian named William Pokhlebkin, who soon produced a treatise showing that the Poles had begun making vodka several decades after the Russians. (Pokhlebkin was killed, two years ago, in his apartment in the town of Podolsk, some twenty-five miles south of Moscow; one rumor has it that the murderer was a vengeful Pole.)

Some historians compare the Russian national dependence on vodka to the Tatar yoke, and there's a certain historical irony to the analogy. According to legend, vodka was first produced by monks at the Chudov Monastery, in the Kremlin, in the late fifteenth century, around the same time that the Russians finally freed themselves of Tatar rule. At first, the monks worked with alcohol imported from Genoa, through the Crimean port of Feodosiya. Later, it became common to make vodka out of the local grain alcohol, which was produced from rye or wheat and soft spring water. Almost everything about this story seems overly symbolic: the involvement of men of God, the name of the monastery, which no longer exists (chudov means "miraculous"), and its setting in the Russian capital. Evidently, many of the documents relating to the birth of vodka were destroyed in the mid-seventeenth century by the Russian Orthodox Church, which later declared vodka an invention of the Devil. (This despite the fact that Russian clergymen themselves have always had a healthy respect for the drink.)

The act of mixing alcohol with water could be a carryover from Mediterranean culture--in particular from the ancient Greeks, who mixed their wine with water--but it is more likely that the mixture was initially intended as a disinfectant for the treatment of wounds. Vodka quickly escaped the grip of medicine, however, and transubstantiated into the "burnt wine" some Swedes reminisced about after an expedition to Moscow, in 1505. A few decades later, that burnt wine had set all of Russia aflame. The drink became so popular that by 1533 the Russian state had farmed out vodka production to local tavern owners, who--although they had to kiss the Cross and swear to tell the truth--were soon wallowing in corruption. In the centuries before, when people had drunk mead, drunkenness was reserved for occasions of "revelry"; vodka transformed that revelry into the status quo.

The good times were short-lived. In 1648, a tavern revolt broke out in Moscow and then spread to other towns. The situation was dire. A third of the male population was in debt to the taverns, and for several years the peasants had been so drunk that they hadn't bothered to cultivate the land. In an attempt to put things right, the state assumed a monopoly on the sale of vodka, which meant that the vodka distillers' profits fell. This was when vodka acquired its long-term doppelganger--home brew. People learned how to make a vodka-like drink at home and, in defiance of all prohibitions, continue to make it to this day. (Rural populations consume as many as four and half bottles of home brew for every bottle of vodka.) So far, the state has abrogated its own monopoly six times (the last time under Yeltsin, in 1992), and then reinstated it (in 1993, Yeltsin took fright at the rapid criminalization of the vodka sector), but each reversal has only tightened the grip of dipsomania.

"I feel sorry for the Russian people, who drink so much!" Tsar Alexander III told his Minister of Finance, Sergei Witte. In 1894, Witte launched a wide-reaching initiative to improve the quality of vodka, and thereby firm up the state monopoly. Dmitry Mendeleyev, the god of Russian chemistry, was brought in to do the job. Until then, vodka had been made simply, by processing equal volumes of alcohol and water with a number of trace additives to soften the taste. (Stolichnaya, for instance, has a small amount of sugar.) The water-alcohol mixture was then filtered, using charcoal. Mendeleyev observed that when alcohol and water were combined there was a mysterious contraction of the total mixture. (Five hundred millilitres of water and five hundred millilitres of alcohol produce nine hundred and forty-one millilitres of vodka.) In order to obtain what he asserted was the optimum proportion of alcohol--forty per cent--Mendeleyev said, water and alcohol needed to be measured not by volume but by weight. At the same time, the Russian physiologist Nikolai Volovich determined that the most beneficial dose of vodka to stimulate the working of the heart and to cleanse the blood was fifty grams a day. Temperance societies began to form across the country, but before they could have an effect the First World War began, and prohibition was introduced.

Prohibition remained in force during the 1917 Revolution and the civil war that followed, though followers of Reds and Whites alike took advantage of the melee to loot the vodka warehouses and drink to excess. (Pokhlebkin, in his treatise, jocularly suggested that the Reds won because they guarded the warehouses better and punished drunkenness by shooting.) Prohibition was repealed under Lenin in the mid-twenties, in a bid for popularity. He authorized the production of rykovka, a milder form of vodka, which was thirty-per-cent alcohol. (It was named after the finance minister at the time, Aleksei Rykov.) But after Lenin died, vodka returned to its full strength, and its sale helped pay for the socialist industrialization of the U.S.S.R.

When the war against Hitler began, every Russian soldier at the front was given a daily "commissar's ration" of a hundred grams, as stipulated by the Ministry of Defense. Vodka manufacturers claim that the drink was as important as Katyusha rocket launchers in the victory over Nazism, because it bolstered the Russian Army's spirits. But Vladimir Nuzhny, a professor of narcology and one of Russia's best-known theoreticians of alcoholism, thinks otherwise. Those hundred grams were a disaster for the entire postwar generation, he told me. Alcohol dependence soared, and the result was a downward spiral of dissolution that continued into the nineteen-sixties. When the monopoly on vodka production was abolished again, in the early nineteen-nineties, the vodka sector was thrown into chaos: the rich New Russians, who kick-started the motor of Russian "bandit" capitalism, were essentially old-fashioned bootleggers.

Mendeleyev not only created the classic standard for Russian vodka; he also gave the concoction its name. For several centuries, official documents had referred to vodka as "grain wine." To this day, there are probably more euphemisms for vodka than for anything other than the male sex organ. Its aliases range from "hot water," "the monopolka," "the bubble," "crankshaft," "the bitter stuff," and "the white stuff" to the classic Soviet "half litre" and "quarter bottle" (also known as a "daughter"). Etymologically, the word "vodka" is derived from voda, the Russian word for "water." (The addition of the letter "k" makes it diminutive.)

The word appeared in standard Russian dictionaries in the mid-nineteenth century, but the upper classes and the urban middle class still regarded the drink as uncultured, almost obscene. Vodka was consumed primarily by the lower classes (hence the Russian idiom "drunk as a cobbler"). This was a result both of the quality of the vodka available (most of it was made from wood alcohol and smelled strongly of fuel oil) and of the barbarous "tavern" fashion in which it was consumed (it was illegal in taverns to eat food with liquor). Until the late nineteenth century, vodka was not even bottled--there weren't enough bottles--and it was measured by the vedro, or pail (equal to twenty-five pints).

The secret of the word "vodka" lies in its effect on the masses--in the mixture of lust and shame it inspires. The alcoholic views vodka as a woman; he is afraid to reveal his feelings for her, and is at the same time incapable of restraining them. The very mention of her name creates an atmosphere of conspiracy and mystical exaltation that provokes a kind of pagan stupor. In its essence, vodka is a brazen and shameless thing.

Vodka is unlike other forms of alcohol in that there is no justifiable excuse for drinking it. 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. The Russian gulps his vodka down, grimacing and swearing, and immediately reaches for something else to "smooth it out." The result, not the process, is what's important. You might as well inject vodka into your bloodstream as drink it.

But then that's not entirely true, as all Russians, with the exception of the estimated five per cent of the adult population that doesn't drink, can tell you. Vodka is like a song--it may have banal lyrics and a simple melody, but the combination, like that of alcohol and water, is more than the sum of its parts. In respectable society these days, vodka is served at a table set with a range of dishes perfected in minute detail by the old Russian landowners. The vodka ceremony has its own traditions ("No eating after the first glass"), its superstitions and catchphrases ("Vodka is the aunt of wine"), its schedule (ordinary Russian drunks are distinguished from alcoholics by the fact that they wait until five in the afternoon to start drinking), and its accoutrements (fish, salted gherkins, pickled mushrooms, jellied meat, and sauerkraut)--not to mention its toasts, which are the perfect excuse for consuming alcohol while simultaneously focussing on the general conversation. Every Russian knows that drinking vodka with pelmeni, a kind of meat dumpling, can induce a high not far short of nirvana.

Vodka has taken control of the will and conscience of a substantial sector of the Russian population. If you add up all the time that Russians have devoted to vodka and gather together all the vodka-fuelled impulses of the soul--the fantasies, the dreams, the weeklong binges, the family catastrophes, the shamefaced hangovers, the murders, suicides, and fatalities (favorite Russian pastimes include choking on your own vomit and falling out of a window)-- it becomes clear that behind the official history of the Russian state there exists another dimension. Despite all the misadventures and tragedies of Russian alcoholism, the spotlight here belongs to the inexplicable, almost universal delight that Russians take in the notion of drunken disorder. That delight has been recorded over the centuries in the accounts of astounded foreign travellers, such as the Dutch diplomat Balthazar Coet, who visited Moscow in 1676 and wrote, "We saw only the scandalous behavior of debauchees, glorified by the thronging crowd for their proficiency in drunkenness." We encounter the same philosophy in the samizdat best-seller from the Brezhnev era, Venedikt Erofeyev's "Moscow to the End of the Line," a manifesto of indiscriminate social dissidence and a frank apologia for the metaphysics of drunkenness. "Everybody in Russia who was ever worth anything, everybody who was ever any use to the country," the book asserts, "every one of them drank like swine."

Drinking vodka is a social activity. When John Steinbeck was in Moscow, the story has it, it took him a while to understand that the three fingers two friendly guys waved at him were an invitation to split a bottle of vodka three ways; he ended up drinking a trois with them in a doorway anyway, apparently with no regrets. But the vodka-drinking ritual also involves a harsh questioning of human conventions. It demands freedom from history, from responsibility, from health, even from life itself. This condition of free fall, of moral weightlessness and philosophical incorporeality, represents both an attack on the "rational" West and a haughty assertion of Russian truth.

Gorbachev is of the opinion that "vodka has done more harm than good to the Russian people," but Evgeny Popov, a contemporary Russian writer who comes from hard-drinking Siberia, holds the opposite view. In conversation in the bar of Moscow's Central Writers' House, Popov claimed that vodka has helped the Russian people counter the stress of living in a less than perfect nation. Vodka has provided access to a private life that is closed to the state, a place where it is possible to relax, to forget your troubles, to engage in sex with the illusion of free choice. Nowhere else has the relationship between literature and drink been as intense as it is in Russia. The revolutionary Nikolai Nekrasov, the emigre Aleksandr Kuprin, the leading Stalinist writer Aleksandr Fadeyev, the Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov, and the man who is probably the best Russian writer of the twentieth century, Andrei Platonov, have all had love affairs with the bottle. As Popov told me, "Vodka makes it easier to think up literary plots."

The philosophy of vodka has its dark corner of violence. Russian despots with a sadistic streak, like Peter the Great and Stalin, have taken pleasure in forcing their guests to drink more than they could handle. Other hosts force-feed their guests vodka in order to reduce the social distance between them, to humiliate and deride or take advantage. Vodka is capable not only of generating bravado but also of inducing the excruciating feeling of remorse and self-abasement that is one of the essential elements of the ambivalent Russian personality. Hence the question that the Russian alcoholic traditionally asks his drinking companion: "Do you respect me?" The drinking Russian suffers from a marked divergence between his sober impulses and his drunken ones. It is not easy to govern an entire people in this state.

A vodka museum will open in Moscow next year, and a large festival is being planned to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the drink, but no one was able to provide me with a satisfactory explanation for why that anniversary is being celebrated in 2003. I decided to try asking the distillers themselves. I started by attempting to infiltrate Moscow's largest vodka factory, which produces the high-quality brand Crystall. But it proved to be an almost impregnable fortress--I had to get state backing just to enter the production premises. The gloomy brick factory building was erected beside the river Yauza during Witte's state-vodka monopoly in 1901. Because the famous Molotov cocktails were produced there during the Second World War, it became a target for German bombing raids. The factory was damaged, but it survived, continuing to supply the front with both Molotov cocktails and vodka. It now produces up to five million bottles a month, and the sight of alcohol pouring into numberless bottles there immediately summoned up the vision of the million Russian throats that empty those bottles every day. Inside, the Crystall factory has the sublime atmosphere of a cathedral. It is absolutely sterile. There is almost no smell of alcohol, and the employees wear white coats. The vodka is produced on a specialized production line, developed in Italy and Germany, in which alcohol is mechanically mixed with water (taken from the main Moscow water supply but specially filtered), and then the vodka is bottled, sealed, and packed into boxes. Most of the machine operators are women, because, as my female guide told me, women are more suited to monotonous work. The factory's melancholic director, Aleksandr Timofeyev, who has since been fired, was exceedingly courteous and evasive in conversation. The only thing I managed to get out of him was a confession that he himself didn't drink, so he didn't really know much about vodka. He sent me off as soon as he could with a very fine bottle.

To get answers, you have to go to the top, a truism that was confirmed by my conversation with Sergei Viktorovich Zevenko, who was known, when I saw him earlier this year, as the "vodka king." Zevenko was the director of Rosspirtprom, the government-run company that currently controls forty per cent of vodka production in Russia and oversees more than a hundred high-quality vodka factories. But he told me he had been drunk only once in his life, right after high school, when he was seeing off a friend who was joining the Army. Now, at the age of thirty-four, he recalled the episode with disgusted laughter: "It took me an entire week to recover. It was a severe shock to my system."

Zevenko had a complicated life. His competitors envied his sovereign status. His efforts to persuade Russians to eschew the cheaper forms of vodka, which are more likely to cause fatal liver disease, for the higher-quality, state-controlled varieties had earned him, among New Russians, the status of "a temporary man." He himself said that there was a six-million-dollar price on his head: even in the corridors of the Rosspirtprom headquarters, he was accompanied by two bodyguards, and he drove through town with six submachine gunners in tow. He could relax only when he was abroad. The private companies that produce vodka (the vodka monopoly these days exists primarily on paper) had offered to pay him two million dollars a year to organize their operations, but he said that he'd work only for the state.

I met with Zevenko in his spacious office, in a high-rise on Kutuzovsky Prospect, overlooking the Moscow River. He was lean and fit, in a black sweater and slim black trousers. He looked nothing at all like an old-time Soviet bureaucrat or even a Putin-era politician. Like Gorbachev, he was from Stavropol, and he told me in his southern-Russian accent that he had never been a Soviet man--"I didn't like marching in formation"--although he had once been a member of the Komsomol. Educated as a lawyer, he described himself as a manager.

Zevenko said that the lack of skilled personnel was the main problem facing Russia now. As he put it, eighty per cent of Russians today are "rotten," and he looked to the children of the new social order, who he hoped would be capable of bringing Russia fully into the civilized world. We spoke of Russia's five-hundred-year failure to control its dependency. What could be done about it? The idea of subjugating vodka--of making it work for the state and contribute to the creation of a healthy nation--is a paradoxical one, and although Zevenko was prepared to fight for it, he was well aware that his efforts would never earn him much recognition. The vodka world was too turbulent and risky, not unlike the narcotics market, and Zevenko was a thorn in the side of those who didn't wish to see order imposed. He didn't believe that a real monopoly of vodka production was possible, he said, but he did hope to squeeze as much of the low-quality vodka out of the market as he could. I left his office feeling that new people really were being born in Russia, people who didn't expect gratitude for their efforts, either from the state or from the public. But the vodka world turned out to be as turbulent as Zevenko predicted; not long after our meeting, he, too, was fired and he disappeared from sight. Still, he was not alone in his views, and, odd as it may seem, vodka's official five-hundredth anniversary--which was almost certainly proclaimed in order to give a boost to the vodka market--could actually mark the beginning of our long goodbye to the drink.

The narcotics specialist Vladimir Nuzhny criticized Gorbachev's campaign against alcohol for its "anti-scientific" approach, but he also told me that capitalism, if it succeeds, could put an end to the Russian addiction. "The new generation of entrepreneurs don't drink vodka," he said. "Young people are already switching to beer. They have to make decisions with a clear head. The privately owned factories fire people for drunkenness. The next fifteen or twenty years could bring a serious change for the better. It all depends on the economy." Gorbachev had also said that the future lies "in an emphasis on beer and wine."

Vodka culture is dividing. The Moscow elite choose between imported drinks and high-quality vodka. They drink, but they don't get drunk. It is also slowly becoming fashionable not to drink at all. (In that sense, the teetotaller Putin sets an example for the whole country.) The provinces, though, lag behind, and in rural areas vodka is still a kind of second currency. The choice there is not between vodka and wine but between cheap vodka and home brew; expensive vodka is seen as an extravagance or a pretension. In short, the vodka god will not give up easily, but he may yet be tamed, perhaps even relegated to historical myth. Vodka has always teetered between Heaven and Hell. Gorky, in a memoir about his boyhood on the Volga, writes that the people drank for joy and they drank for sorrow; the Russian soul is versatile.

(Translated, from the Russian,

by Andrew Bromfield.)

Vodka celebrates its five-hundredth anniversary.