letempsdunebiere.ca/stalins-horrible-binge-drinking-parties/
TIL Stalin, towards the end of his life, routinely forced the politburo to get incredibly drunk. His compulsory dinners featured forced drinking games, such as guessing the temperature and taking a shot of vodka for each degree off.
Boar on the floor!
L to the OG was wrong for that
That was some real wtf shit the first time you see it
There was a LOT of projectile vomiting...Krushchev in particular later described it in detail lol
The reason Stalin did this was to see what treasonous things people might let slip once they had their inhibitions wiped out by alcohol. So it was also a potentially deadly loyalty test - because he'd have the reasons to have people shot.
(Edit as an afterthought: Not that he ever needed any...millions were executed or worked to death in the gulags for no logical reason whatsoever, save fulfilling a quota of x people eliminated and a need to rapidly industrialise what had been largely an agrarian, peasant country via the forced labour of millions)
Stalin himself would drink very little or just have watered down vodka...so he could sit there observing everyone with a wholly paranoid eye
I'm starting to think this Stalin guy might not have been such a nice fellow!
Sounds like a very healthy way to govern.
That might be the most Russian thing I've ever read.
Also I feel like getting shot wasn't the only way to die from this
Nikita Khrushchev would then go home and have to drunkenly tell his wife which of his jokes Stalin laughed at while she wrote down notes.
This was the peak of Russian diplomacy and statesmanship.
Didn’t he want a pizza or was he lured with pizza?
He wanted pizza.
He snuck out the next night to get pizza as well; two nights in a row he tried to slip White House security for pizza.
The first night he was in his underwear and had no idea where he was.
The second night, he was more sober but was mistaken by a guard as a drunken intruder and was swarmed by agents.
Almost caused an international incident because he wanted to go out on the town by himself, no Secret Service or FSB following him. And yes, he was wasted when he decided to do this both times. But the first night when he was literally walking down the street in front of the White House in his underwear, he was completely blacked out.
I’m going to remember it as he was lured back to the White House with pizza. The scent wafting into his nose and him floating and following the trail back into the White House.
I mean that’s all it took for a majority of the kids who went to college with me…
Molotov C-H-H-H-H
As we saw in Death of Stalin
No more navy jokes
Ooof, "Guess the temperature" sounds like one hell of a hardcore drinking game.
Only way that could be more dangerous is if they subbed out the Vodka with Everclear.
Thank god they were using Celsius. If they were guessing in Fahrenheit it would probably kill them
A russian alcoholic is not the same as an american one. The amount they drink, even for breakfast is insane. A warmup 200ml vodka was normal for my grandpa. First thing in the morning.
Eastern Europeans, man. I was working a trauma once (fall from standing). It was a 60ish year old guy who fell on the sidewalk. Romanian. His BAL was POINT SEVEN SEVEN (for reference: if a non-drinker gets to .4 they probably die) and he was still talking. I mentioned to the doc that that was the most insane BAL I’ve ever seen. He replied, “I bet this guy’s hands start to shake at .5…” Bananas.
Jesus, past "qualifies for ETT" and also somehow "still talking semi-coherently".
My early 2000s protocols authorised ETT on someone who was .5 or above, and I think it's lower now.
I remember a recurrent spy storyline about killing a Westerner in the Soviet Union (brought up by multiple novelists in multiple periods) by introducing amounts of alcohol into his system, and while I appreciated the elegance of "hard to prove someone didn't take this voluntarily" I have a hard time thinking that there is any way a Russian could calibrate what is a plausible BAC for a Westerner.
Dude, RIGHT!? I was like, “what now?” He said, “No idea. VERY slow and VERY high dose phenobarb taper? We might have to put this dude in a coma. He’s probably gonna walk out the second he can though and go get topped off.” Unbelievable, the shit we see.
Yeah, I don't even want to think about it. You do see some old alkies who somehow stayed alive who are on ridiculous doses of Valium every day they're inpatient just to keep the sick off.
I mean, I joke with my anaesthetist every time when they advise me clear liquids only that vodka is a clear liquid, but I wouldn't do it.
A lot of ex-medics like me do like their substances, but we tend to respect "by the way this can totally kill you." I require a minimum of 24 hours and preferably more between one alcoholic drink and one dose of benzodiazepine, which is prescribed me for severe PTSD. In other words, if I go to a bar with anyone, I am volunteering for a possible 24 hours of flashbacks and trauma, because I won't even think of mixing those two.
One of the nice things about field medicine is that most physicians did take the trouble to educate you continually, and this was very influential on a Young Me, because so often they were like, "welp, fucked if we know, we're gonna try this, though." It gave me a lot of perspective on being an adult and seeking medical consultation. The idea that physicians can help you is great, and there's a lot they can do, but realistically, quite often, they're calculating the most probable thing.
Anyway, you and I both know that the second that guy was conscious, if he didn't discharge himself AMA by walking out of the hospital without telling anyone, he was definitely going to wander outside for a smoke at the first opportunity and long before any of us would have assumed he could leave bed.
Is the combination of benzos and alcohol really that risky? Like how dangerous is it to have, say, 10mg of valium and a glass of wine - which seems to be the equivalent of what you're talking about avoiding here.
Edit: really? Someone thinks I'm suicidal because I am asking a medic a question about pharmacological interactions? Man, if I wanted to off myself with pills (which I don't) I would probably be savvy enough to know it would take more than one...
I have done it countless times. It is a deadly combo but as all in medicine - the dose makes the poison.
The primary thing to note is their effects are not additive but more along the links of being multiplicative. If benzo dose effect is a three, and so if the booze, together they add up to a 9. Hard to put numbers to it but that's the gist of it so it is important to be careful; of course not doing it is best, but if you are going to, small doses.
Suicide bot is irritating. Anyway. Yes, it's a multiplicative effect and alcohol and benzos amplify the other's sedative effects, including decrease in respiratory rate. This is why you should really not combine them. Am I overly cautious? Sure. On the other hand, I'm still alive.
There are a lot of medications labelled "do not take with alcohol" that your pharmacist can tell you "eh, not such a big deal." But benzos are not one of those. That label means it.
I believe to this day, Russian alcohol is price controlled by the government to intentionally keep prices low, in order to stave off mass withdrawals among the working class. The older generations in particular are drinking an awful lot, all the time.
There’s also the problem of pseudo-alcohol : high proof cleaning products priced so low even the poorest can afford them, packaged in liquor bottles because the manufacturers are fully aware of what most people are buying their products for.
It's quite the opposite actually: making vodka is incredibly cheap, so normal countries tax alcohol to prevent it from being so easily available in large amounts (and to compensate the cost alcohol consumption has on society overall).
Fun fact: making Ethanol is so easy, industrial chemical plants are also subject to so called whisky taxes. So to make really basic and widely used reagents not obscenely expensive, they have to poison the Ethanol they make with Methanol (wood alcohol, the stuff that makes you blind) which behaves similarly enough to not matter for typical uses.
And if they happen to require pure Ethanol, they just synthesize it in house.
You make it sound like they add methanol. Methanol is the first product from distillation before the alcohol and is usually removed. Wouldn't they just not remove the methanol that gets produced?
Edit: thanks yall this is great info for my illegal moonshine operation
No, additional methanol is added- in industrial processing the amount of methanol generated in making ethanol in a lab is negligible. The mythology about methanol in moonshine is really exaggerated and it is only really measurable because of the inefficient fermentation methods/inputs used in liquor distilling.
Yeah, methanol contamination is more about efficiency than anything.
Like soldiers figured out a long time ago that freezing a container of hard cider on a cold winter’s night “distills” it into “Applejack”. Most of the water content of the cider freezes, and what you’re left with is a concentrated liquor of about 30% abv on the high end. But this method does nothing to rid the alcohol of toxic volatiles like Methanol, leading many to say an applejack hangover is the worst a person can experience.
There's very little methanol in apple cider to begin with and if you have filtered out the skin and pulp before fermentation it's almost none.
Also, freezing will generally only get you up to 20-25%, nearly impossible to get up to 40% without real distillation.
Due to azeotropes, in spite of differing boiling points in separate solutions with water, a standard still (even a standard commercial still) can not meaningfully change the ratio of methanol to ethanol.
Very large stills at the highest volume distilleries can remove methanol which is a normal trace byproduct of fermentation. Similarly, large scientific stills can remove at least some of the methanol from denatured alcohol.
This is why methanol IS deliberately added to high proof ethanol to render it "unfit for human consumption" so the taxes on drinking alcohol don't have to be paid on cleaning products.
That's not how it works. Industrial distillers use pure sugar, which doesn't produce methanol (it does make trace, but unharmful, amounts of some other nasty stuff like acetone). Methanol is produced when you've got pectin in your wash (primarily from peels), and it's not produced in dangerous quantities when distilling the normal stuff you'd make alcohol from. And it's not significantly higher in the heads or tails. There's a ton of misinformation about methanol. Read the pinned post on r/firewater for all the details.
This isn't about you in particular, but rather this whole thread – I just read like 20 conflicting posts in a row, each more confident than the last, that they understand industrial and chemical processes at scale, and I'm picturing 20 different neckbeards safely in moms basement who've never stepped foot on a factory floor furiously typing at each other. lmao.
It doesn't produce enough to matter. Think about it: beer and wine are fermented the exact same way spirits are, but they are never distilled, so all the methanol produced is still in those beverages.
I may or may not partake in home distillation as a hobby. This is one of those historical misconceptions that annoys me; moonshine is not going to give you methanol poisoning. Even if the 'stiller doesn't remove any at all, it will just taste a little worse and probably give a worse hangover.
With the amount of methanol naturally present after distillation, the quantity you'd have to consume to cause methanol poisoning would just kill you via general alcohol poisoning first.
Yep, ethanol is used as fuel, and it's cheaper than gas. 0.5 USD per liter or something like that. There's some poison added to make it undrinkable, so special taxes aren't applied. Or it's mixed with 15 percent gasoline
Hah we had 100% ethanol in one of the labs I worked in. Now it's kept under lock and key because some would suspiciously go missing now and again...
My coworkers fondly reminisce about taking the lab grade ethanol, dilluting it with cheap wine and heating it on a hot plate to make grad student gluwhein around Christmas time
My old lab manager would tell stories of his PI back in the 80s having lab parties where everyone drank the 100% EtOH. He said things were pretty wild between that and all the pharma/device stuff they would get.
Buying ethanol for a lab is fun. When you're within the licensed amount where you don't have to pay tax, its about £10/L for ultra pure stuff. That same bottle with tax can be more like £150.
I worked with a Russian guy from Eastern Europe who went to work in Russia proper for a few years in a factory I asked him what he did there he said oh anything I was the guy who covered anyone who turned up drunk there were a few of us, apparently the qualification required was just being sober.
Right? Just wild... I worked with a Russian who said that they paid people in bottles of vodka, especially to clean slow off their roofs. I asked if this was back in the day and nope, this is still common (as of 2017). We then did a Google Map tour of his hometown and holy fuck Russia is beyond backward
Its a control thing too. The government is robbing the people blind and making their lives worse and worse.
If you dont keep them drunk, they may start waking up about how shit their lives are and ask questions. Not only does drinking help dull the shittiness, but drunk people are easier to lie to.
if you look at the history, it's always been about control. why would the present be different?
Suffice to say that at time, the distillieries were personal property of the Czar, the communists basically closed them down but Stalin made them government controlled again. Iirc, anyone more knowledgeable: feel free to correct me.
So yeah, while folkloristic, Russian (or ex-soviet) alcohol consumption is a long standing tragedy.
This is the truth. My best friend is Russian and I don’t think I’ve ever been to a party of his where I didn’t black out. The only thing close is when I partied with Irish guys on vacation- starting at 8 am and they closed the bar down (I quit around 3 pm).
My great grandfather was a tractorist (one of the best jobs in the USSR at the time, they even glorified it in film) and would drink 3 bottles (500ml) a day, every day, for decades and performed his job flawlessly. During the war he was working 17 hour days and managed to avoid the front because of how essential his job was.
That's insane, how old was he when he died?
No idea how he lasted that long but he died in his 70s. He survived a lot, like the Kulak purges where his parents tossed him out of a train taking them to their deaths and some strangers took him in. My family medical history is mostly either died in war, died of starvation, or died from the drink.
*got reported for this comment. "A concerned redditor reached out to us about you" etc etc.
I thank your geat granpappies liver 🤝
My Alabama Redneck grandfather did the same but whiskey. Almost every hour on the hour hed hit the bottle so he could get through the day. At night, it was time for the ol' 12 pack of beer.
Dude survived Vietnam as an infantryman, smoked and drank heavily every day, and lived to be 82.
I'd be dead before lunch.
Buddy, that's just your grandpa being a hardcore alcoholic. Russian and American alcoholics are pretty much the same. Speaking from experience as both Russian and American functioning alcoholic myself.
I'm pretty much the same as any other American functioning alcoholic, taking it easy during work week and, admittedly rarely, could happen a full weekend binge.
As far as hardcore alcoholics, those differ more from person to person. I've seen homeless wasted alkis who seemed to only drink beer and then there are those like your grandpa.
To be fair, reading about "all the drunks getting together in the sauna mornings and drinking vodka once they'd sweated some out to get their day right before going to work" was a bit of a double take for me.
I think in the West, generally, being a hardcore alkie is more consequential because of thinner safety nets, insofar that if you show up to work drunk repeatedly, they'll either dry you out or fire you, and either way, you can't afford the amount of alcohol you require.
I've known a few in my time, including people whose VA record stated that they had to be given vodka along with Valium each day they were in hospital to keep the sick off because they went into D.T.'s every time they were admitted. Generally that seems to be on a major downswing in the U.S., though admittedly now more people are just going to harder drugs and shortening their life through an inherently unsafe supply, so the people who would have been hardcore alcoholics are now opioid overdoses, but ultimately they were fighting demons and it's just a matter of what they take to get a mental break from the demons.
Gotta separate the wheat from the chaff somehow, I guess. No wimps that can't handle their liquor in Stalin's politburo.
And the entire time they’re playing these insane games, Beria (the only other person besides Stalin to get a pass on drinking) would play childish pranks on all the guests. Bear in mind this is the man largely responsible for the Purges, who directly ordered the deaths of millions. He was head of the NKVD, the KGBs older, uglier daddy.
He was fond of leaving rotten tomatoes in Kruschev’s chair. When Kruschev refused to sit, he’d just put the tomatoes down his shirt and slap his back. He used Whoopie cushions. Again, this man probably killed more people than Hitler.
And if you were pretending to drink or dozing off during the third cowboy movie of the night, Beria would report your failings to Stalin. And then you could expect a knock on your door from the NKVD in the middle of the night.
The movie Death of Stalin got a lot of details wrong or omitted a lot but that opening scene of them drinking together was basically spot on.
You mean: That movie is absolutely fantastic AND they got the opening drinking scene historically correct? Yes. The creator has written lots of political satire. He knows when to take artistic liberties and when not do. That movie is as good as it gets while still being trustworthy in the big strokes.
Perhaps one of the best scenes ever made:
Beria got his in the end.
Yup, and not long after too. That same “I know everything” superiority he lorded over other guests is why Kruschev had him killed.
So long, Comrade Fuckface
Honestly, the world is very fortunate that Khrushchev is the dude who came out on top after Stalin died. He wasn't perfect, but compared to the alternatives...
Malenkov wouldn't be a bad option. The guy was completely westernized, spoke English, French and German, as well as being very liberal and supportive of scientists. One of the main criticisms he received was for advocating a reduction in military spending, focusing centralized economic planning on the production of consumer goods (household appliances, cars, electronics, furniture and clothes) and forming friendlier ties with the West.
Seeing what the Soviet Union would look like if he were Stalin's successor would be interesting to say the least.
It fills me with joy knowing he went to his death blubbering and crying. His executioner had to stick a rag in his mouth to shut him up.
Amazing how many bullies are cowards, even at the grandest scale of monstrosity.
Begging and wailing before a bullet was put in his brain. Rest in piss.
Funny you should mention...
Stalin also liked to stay sober during most of these bouts. He drank a Georgian "wine" that was clear enough that he could substitute water, or water it down. Or he would take shots of "vodka" that were either just water or were watered down (of course, he always had his own personal, separate serving carafe - as a protection against poisoning).
He liked to be in control while others were out of control so he could bait them into saying something he could later use against them, should the "need" arise. Stalin wasn't a very nice person, even to his "friends".
It's really not that hard in Celsius. You're unlikely to be more than two degrees off. People who grow up on farenheit don't always seem to intuitively grasp that two or three degrees celsius is a pretty big difference in temperature.
Yeah but if comrade stalin finds you getting it wrong funny, you probably do want to get it wrong
What next? Place a bar of chocolate in their pocket, they’ll shit their pants?
Funnily enough, Stalin got a kick out of slapstick comedy and so some of his colleagues would slip tomatoes into another’s jacket and then push them into a wall. Stalin would be distracted enough by laughing that he would forget to make people drink.
Source: Behind the Bastard podcast “Stalin After Dark”
Kruschev was the biggest clown, think someone like conan obrien. He was mostly kept around because he made stalin laugh a lot.
So thats why no one saw him ever succeeding stalin for the crown, but its also why everyone (except beria) was cool with him taking charge, they all liked him and was able to gather enough support.
He then forced his rivals to retire but that was it, just peaceful retirement and no siberian labor camps or executions. Well except for Beria, but he had it coming.
Beria definitely had it coming.
Beria was often driven around Moscow in his limousine. He would point out young women that he wanted to be taken to his dacha, where wine and a feast awaited them. After dining, Beria would take the women into his soundproofed office and rape them.
...His bodyguards reported that their duties included handing each victim a flower bouquet as she left the house. Accepting it implied that the sex had been consensual; refusal would mean arrest.
...In one case, Beria picked up Tatiana Okunevskaya, a well-known Soviet actress, under the pretence of bringing her to perform for the Politburo. Instead he took her to his dacha, where he offered to free her father and grandmother from prison if she submitted. He then raped her, telling her, "Scream or not, it doesn't matter". In fact, Beria knew that Okunevskaya's relatives had been executed months earlier. Okunevskaya was arrested shortly afterwards and sentenced to solitary confinement in the Gulag...
Evidence suggests that Beria also murdered some of these women... According to Martin Sixsmith, in a BBC documentary, "Beria spent his nights having teenagers abducted from the streets and brought here for him to rape. Those who resisted were strangled and buried in his wife's rose garden."
Yeah, no tears shed for that monster.
Edit: Someone sent a Reddit cares message for this? Lmao, I guess there's a Beria fan out there.
Behind the Bastards did a couple episodes on him.
Great podcast. My "favorites," so much as you can have them in a podcast about the worst people in history, were the episodes on King Leopold of Belgium and Muammar Gaddafi.
There's the quote along the lines of "say what you want about Hitler, at least he had an ethos" that cuts to why Leopold may genuinely be the biggest bastard in history. Sadly there's a lot of contenders.
What's crazy is that Okunevskaya outlived Beria despite being in a gulag and got released after he died. She returned to acting after.
What the fuck? If that was in a book I’d say that was an over the top bad guy. How is that real
Oh, you should check out the podcast the other comment mentioned: Behind the Bastards.
King Leopold of Belgium makes the above look like philanthropy. The episodes on Muammar Gaddafi are also just wild and bizarre.
Stalin refered to him as "his Himmler", dude was cartoonishly evil
You should watch Death of Stalin.
Everyone should watch Death of Stalin.
Where can a war hero get some lubrication around here?
Tell me something. Why has the army been replaced by the NKVD all over Moscow? I mean, I'm smiling, but I am very fucking furious.
Khrushchev truly was the Conan O'Brien of the Politburo.
I love how they did that in the movie with the tomato! So many details that actually happened, it's nuts!
This is probably my favorite episode of Behind the Bastards. The bit about one of his officials replacing another official's ceremonial blade with a pickle still makes me laugh.
I like how the attitude about him in the episode is that he's "just the worst" not due to the horrible things that he did, but because of the small annoyances. He would insist on choosing the music at parties, make people watch his favorite movie with him all the time. He's that friend of a friend that you don't want to see at parties.
My favorite was Stalin's captioning the art pieces sent to him for approval
The line is funny in the film, but here in the comments, that has absolutely killed me.
It was too good not to post in this context LOL
According to this documentary film (with amazingly crisp historical footage): “da”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbkb32OKRPo&pp=ygUcZGVhdGggb2Ygc3RhbGluIGRpbm5lciBzY2VuZQ%3D%3D
Is that the joke? That I miss my [redacted] photo tonight?
Permission to go home, lie down and watch some Soviet propaganda so my face isn't beet red for my [redacted] photo tonight?
Made a joke about the Navy. Didn't laugh.
On the same website : Alexander the Great and the Worst Party in History:
The most shocking story is that of the funeral of his friend Calanus, an Indian sage who had accompanied the army for two years. On his death, Alexander the Great organized a contest “to determine who could drink the greatest quantity of unmixed wine”. According to Chares of Mytilene, 35 people died before midnight, and a further six from various complications in the days that followed.
The winner himself did not survive more than four days after the event. Promachos, who drank an impressive 13 liters of wine, received the prize. The wine was Macedonian, which means it was usually a bit stronger than Greek wine. For his efforts, Promachos received the prize, only to die three days later, also of alcohol poisoning. This means that perhaps all the competitors in the drinking festival at Calanus’ funeral are dead.
https://letempsdunebiere.ca/alexander-the-great-and-the-worst-party-in-history/
I bet it’s safe to say they are all dead by now.
This is most certainly exaggerated, as with most Alexander the Great stories ( most of which were written long after Alexander died).
A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is considered a dull affair.
Dinner began around 4 pm, and lasted until dawn.
After a lavish meal of many courses (while the rural republics starved), drinking games and many toasts were ordered, with each in attendance forced to drink wine or vodka by the ever present Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s chief of secret police and arguably one of the most evil men to ever live. Stalin, under orders from his doctor, either drank wine mixed with water or not at all, keeping his mind sharp while his political associates were forced to drink far beyond the point of self-control. Following the drinking games, Stalin and company would retire to his private movie theater, to screen American westerns captured from the Nazis during the Soviet march on Berlin. The films often malfunctioned (Stalin had his professional projectionist killed), and Stalin routinely and purposely spoiled endings, talking the entire time. After the movies, when the guests were already blackout drunk and barely able to stand, Stalin would order a midnight snack to be prepared, and more rounds of drinks poured. Guests would then be led outside into the courtyard of Stalin’s compound, where he and Beria were fond of pushing drunk and confused guests into Stalin’s swimming pool, where many nearly drowned.
After an evening of insane binge drinking, guests were finally allowed to leave around 4 or 5 in the morning, while being fully expected to appear at their vital government jobs by 8. And they could fully expect to be “invited” back for another evening of debauchery the following night.
Nikita Kruschev, Stalin’s successor and regular party attendee, often said “The only one having fun at Stalin’s parties, was Stalin.”
Curiously enough, the night before Stalin's stroke that would ultimately kill him, he didn't water down his alcohol and got super hammered. Given that alcohol can drastically increase the risk of strokes, it's likely that night of heavy drinking is what killed him.
Specifically (I learned all this stuff I'm seeing in this thread from the recent Behind the Bastards on Beria so take this with a grain of salt) he had a heart condition and the alcohol increased his risk of stroke.
At this point in his life he had probably had several smaller strokes, we're not sure on medical history because he kept having doctors killed after he didn't like what they had to say.
I listened to those episodes, too, pretty fascinating stuff
EDIT: I personally loved the bits about Stalin "pranking" people with tomatoes
Curiously enough, the only time in his entire rule that he gave his guards the night off, was the night he fell ill. Coincidentally, it was relatively shortly after purging the last head of his bodyguard and very shortly after he began moving against the current head of his bodyguard.
Vic Vinegar never would have had that happen on his watch. He would have spotted that embolus forming in his blood during a routine ocular pat down.
arguably one of the most evil men to ever live
This is underselling it, Beria is up there with Dirlewanger, unfortunately Beria got out with a bullet to the head rather than being beaten to death like a dog (which is what happened to Dirlewanger)
It's also notable that even Stalin thought he was a piece of shit rapist
In one instance, when Stalin learned that his then-teenage daughter, Svetlana, was alone with Beria at his house, he telephoned her and told her to leave immediately.
Beria directed Sarkisov to keep a list of the names and phone numbers of the women that he had sex with. Eventually, he ordered Sarkisov to destroy the list as a security risk, but Sarkisov retained a secret copy. When Beria's fall from power began, Sarkisov passed the list to Viktor Abakumov, the former wartime head of SMERSH and now chief of the MGB – the successor to the NKVD. Abakumov was already aggressively building a case against Beria. Stalin, who was also seeking to undermine Beria, was thrilled by the detailed records kept by Sarkisov, demanding: "Send me everything this asshole writes down!"
When stalin is worried about his daughter being alone with a guy, you know that guy is an absolute monster
For all of Stalins faults (and there were many) he did legitimately love his daughter over just about anything else, so that little detail is very telling about what he thought of Beria
The same could not be said for his eldest son
Vasily on the other hand was basically thrown into the military and forgotten about, Stalins family is morbidly fascinating
Artyom (the adoptive son) seems to have been protected fairly well, but I don't know if that was because Stalin felt like he had a debt to his father etc
How did they get any actual work done with all this bullshit going on?
Because Beria was actually quite good* at his job, he was good at managing the NKVD as a political tool, and even better at gathering intel he could use to blackmail his opponents.
*by good I mean he was adept at using politics, violence and fucking over anyone who wasn't Beria
When the tides eventually turned on him, his captors had to smuggle him out of the Kremlin in the boot of a car because his men were the Kremlins security guard and would have freed him if they knew he'd been captured.
It's hard to explain how fucking awful the NKVD were to someone who isn't from Eastern Europe/Russia, it's completely incomprehensible to anyone in the West. The post USSR coverup of just how fucked up things were doesn't help either.
Maria Orakhelashvili, wife of Mamia Orakhelashvili and numerous others had all confessed to counter-revolutionary (though the evidence against all of them was found, after Beria's execution, to have consisted of false confessions extracted under torture) but Orakhelashvili himself was holding out, though he repeatedly fainted under interrogation and had to be revived with camphor.[26] Reputedly, Orakhelashvili's ear drums were perforated and his eyes gouged out
Stalin routinely and purposely spoiled endings, talking the entire time
the more i learn about this stalin guy the more i dislike him
Guy sounds like a real jerk
The worst part is the hypocrisy.
Didn't even know he was sick
You think so? I think the worst part is the murdering
I was reading a book about earlier russian politics. Apparently when Lenin first encountered Stalin he said something along the lines of that is an unbalanced madman, make sure he isn't given anything important or allowed to be in charge of anything.
October - China Miéville
I had a job like this. Management liked to party. Hard. If you came out, shut the place down and showed up for work the next day, you were in. Didn't matter if you spent that next day throwing up in the bathroom. And if you didn't show up....gulag.
My previous job was like this, One of the 3 co-owners of the company was a raging alchy, and any time I came up to HQ for a work visit after the first couple months, he'd offer to go to a Twins game if they were in town and would get absolutely fucking wrecked. I never went bar hopping with the regular crew, but that was mostly because if I was in town there was some serious fuckin work to do or I'd be heading down before/on friday when they usually went wild.
Shame that comradery didn't mean shit when they were downsizing.
Minnesotans do be drinking
This article is describing a somewhat more sadistic version of a normal Georgian supra, which is part of why Beria (who was also Georgian) was enforcing the traditions.
Imagine trying to function at your job the next morning at 8am after being piss drunk until 4am.
You’re still going to be piss drunk at 8 am and probably through most of your day
Makes you wonder if Stalin also didn’t want anyone to be too good at their job. Keeping everyone perpetually drunk or hungover and bad at their jobs probably helps keep anyone from getting popular enough to overthrow him.
Exactly. It also gives him an excuse to fire them if they become too popular.
Used to do this occasionally with my friends in my early 20’s after college. I have no idea how we all functioned the next day. Tried it again in my late 20’s and had to call out sick. That’s insane that these old guys were doing it consistently.
There is a very narrow window of life in which you can party with the friends of your early twenties and you either took it or you didn't, but if you try to party like that when you're 29 or 30, you just straight feel like applying for your AARP card. "Hang 'em up, I'm out."
Well the alternative to pounding shots was being shot
Pretty much my life from 19-25 (back when jagerbombs were a thing, so no wonder I was up all night) of course back then I could just leap out of bed 5 minutes before I had to leave. Nowadays I need at least 24 hours to recover after drinking like that.
Hate to break it to you but jagerbombs are still very much a thing. And very fun
Mystery Science Theatre… OF DEATH!!!
Sounds like pledging a fraternity.
Except the youngest of these men were in their mid to late 40s. Almost all of Stalin’s inner circle were born into Tsarist Russia. So they didn’t even have youth on their side.
Nikita Kruschev had terrible arthritis by this point in his life, and Stalin would regularly force him to dance the gopak at these parties (the squatting kick dance), knowing it was literal torture for him. He would be essentially bedridden the following day and unable to walk unassisted. And then he was expected back to do it all again several nights a week, every week, for several years.
Kruschev's quote on the matter:
"When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances."
No doubt he took particular pleasure in having Stalin denounced a few years later then
This kind of thing is so disturbing to me. I cannot watch another person enduring pain in front of me without feeling that pain happening to my own body. It’s like I am the opposite of whatever Stalin was. Sadists are fucking horrific. I don’t understand them at all.
Whu did he do this?
Very difficult to coup the asshole in charge if said asshole knows exactly where you are 20 hours a day and keeps you so drunk, tired and hungover that you will either completely fuck up your plan or accidentally reveal it in your drunken stupor.
The day after Stalin had his stroke was probably the first day they had a full, decent night's sleep in years. No wonder they figured out really quickly they had to kill Beria.
Control, amusement, and because he could.
It gave him an easy way to keep an eye on the people most likely to overthrow him, and getting them so drunk so often was a good way to get them to admit to things they otherwise wouldn’t. Many executions came from details drunk party guests accidentally let slip while 14 vodkas deep.
He also just really like to fuck with people
He was paranoid that his inner circle could/would work to overthrow him. They can’t plan to overthrow you if you take all of their free time away and if they’re hungover for their actual jobs.
Unrelated but kudos for having a somewhat lengthy title that is still very easy to read and understand
I took an undergrad course on Soviet history, and the professor went into great detail on their drinking habits. On the last day of class, the TAs rolled in a couple of coolers, threw them open to reveal bottles of Stoli on ice, and he said “Today…we drink like Russians!”
(This was in the mid-80s, when stuff like this really still happened.)
The irony is that depending when this happened, it may have been during Gorbachev's ill-fated campaign against alcoholism.
The reasons for that campaign was wild. Like the amount of lost productivity from workers being too drunk to work or even getting injured in drunken work related accidents was having a measurable effect on GDP of the USSR if I recall
It still happened in the 2010s. I took a couple of semesters of Russian in college, and the professors held their office hours at the bar near campus that didn't ID, plus held study sessions before exams at their houses (where they also didn't ID anyone).
Tenure is great, I guess, except for all of the bullshit you need to do to get tenure.
although The Death of Stalin was hilarious fiction I consider it historically equivalent to the lunacy that was Stalin's reign
Right, what's a war hero got to do to get some lubrication around here?
Love Zhukov portrayal of medals was inaccurate not because there were too many, but because there were not enough. The director thought it’d be to unbelievable to add more medals to Zhukov’s chest for the audience. https://www.reddit.com/r/ussr/s/iEsZ83PcHZ
These serve as bulletproof vest.
Right, consider me told off. I’m off to represent the Red Army at the buffet
You ladies enjoy yourselves.
Fucking hell, where's you get that, a polish flamethrower!?
I hate being sober. It's a terrible, terrible mood to be in.
It’s great satire, because it was not as far off from reality as you might otherwise think.
It's a joke the whole way through whether you like it or not. The absurdity is lost on the characters because like all authoritarian governments after losing the authoritarian, nobody knows shit and maybe that plane will show up. Until the end, it's all jokes, then you realize how they weren't joking about how much they hated eachother and what they were ready to do for self preservation.
It’s honestly not even that fictitious. The thing with the doctors is true, for example, as is the dead hockey team, the after work movie nights like this article says, all the characters are real people… It’s played for laughs but it’s remarkably historically accurate
The single biggest deviation is how much events are accelerated. In the movie, they pick off Beria right after Stalin's funeral and execute him immediately.
In reality, there was a couple more months of political manoeuvring after the funeral on March 9th. Beria was arrested in late June, and put through a show trial in December (and then immediately executed).
But it works better for the movie to compress the timeline like this.
This kind of farce and satire feels more authentic than a by-the-books historical drama.
It sounds like it'd be fun exactly once, and then only if you could leave the USSR the following morning.
Yeah I’d be down for getting weird with the boys at Stalin’s house. But when you’ve had to go through the same insanity four or five times in a week with no time to recover, I’m sure it started to be more like torture than fun.
Cross out “morning” with “afternoon.” You’d need time to recover from the hangover before getting on a 7:00am Aeroflot plane…
Boar on the floor!
It is wild to me how we humans work. All these people were sitting around an elderly Stalin, deathly afraid of him and probably hating his guts, and they could have killed him with utter ease and gotten away with it.
And yet noone lifted a finger. This frail old man with a crippled arm must have exuded an aura of terror that put Darth Vader to shame.
He's probably the specific most powerful person to ever have lived. He commanded fewer resources than his American counterparts, but he had absolutely and utterly no checks on his authority, and went out of his way to prove it. The fact that he was able to casually murder people like Yagoda, Yezhov, and Tukhachevsky is actually fucking bonkers when you think about it. Never mind the level of control it takes to get something like the Holodomor or the collectivization of agriculture more generally done.
Even normal dictators would risk assassination for any one of those things, never mind be able to do that and more.
Yes, he seemed to have an almost supernatural stranglehold on the russian psyche. When the germans invaded, after him strenously denying the possibility, he retreated to his dacha and waited to be deposed.
And instead his cronies came to him to once again reaffirm their utter loyalty and he was back in the saddle.
Maybe he was onto something with all his paranoid purges, because there never seemed to have been even the slightest internal opposition to him after he got rid of Trotzki.
They were so scared of this frail old man that his guards let him lay in his own piss for ~10 hours after having a stroke because he had ordered them not to enter his room. (Slight) Karma.
The odd thing is, if just one of them had the courage to stab him, probably what would follow would be a bloodbath like Caesar's assassination, with everyone taking turns with their knives.
Heh, that would be a very satisfying alternate timeline story.
It would make another great Tarantino movie such as "Once Upon a Time in Soviet Russia".
Cheap government vodka was also used as a weapon against the people.
If it works it works I guess
The fact that the Russian public drank so much in those days really puts into perspective just how insane these binges must have been. Many of these men would have already probably been considered alcoholics by modern standards, and they were forced to drink so much and so often by Stalin that they were legitimately afraid of it. It served as an effective intimidation tactic for Stalin without the mess of gulags and firing squads.
It’s hard to plot against a man when you’re laying on his floor in a puddle of your own vomit 4 nights a week. He also used the guest’s behavior during the party to determine who needed to be promoted, and who needed to be removed.
Russian alcohol consumption has been wild for a long time. Back at the start of World War One, the tsarist government banned the sale of alcohol so people would focus on the war. Only problem was that tax revenues on alcohol sales were like a third of the country's entire income. Screwed their budget up right from the start.
The Soviets kept the price of Vodka artificially low for the public. Drunk people are terrible at fomenting revolution. One of the reasons why Gorbachev was unpopular was because he raised the price of Vodka due to its health and societal effects.
Stalin would also drink watered down vodka so as to appear to have a higher tolerance and remain mildly sober while his subordinates got shit faced.
Refusal to drink could be seen as defiance and toasts were often used to gauge loyalty
Thank God they didn’t use Fahrenheit.
He also had a thing for Western's and would host nightly dinner parties and make people watch them. Dude really didnt want to be left alone with his own thoughts.
More to keep an eye on everyone, as allowing people free time meant enough time to plot assassinations...
The Death of Stalin had a couple scenes like this
I listened to a podcast about this, I think it was “Behind the Bastards”. Stalin’s rationale was that if he kept everyone drunk all the time they would be too shitfaced to plot to overthrow him. There are stories of these guys literally begging the butlers to substitute water for the alcohol because they couldn’t drink anymore. They said it was hell on earth. He also loved American westerns and made his ministers watch them all night while getting alcohol poisoning.
Behind the Bastards did a good episode about this called “Stalin After Dark.”
Yeah that’s where I learned of it originally. I’m currently reading a Stalin biography that goes into more detail about it.
Apparently by the end Stalin’s inner circle feared an invite for dinner more than the gulag.
They also talked about it in the recent Beria episodes.
Just like Japanese bosses with their employees
Stalin would often swap out his vodka for water but keep the booze flowing for the 'guests'. Allegedly, during Churchill's 1942 visit Moscow, they got into very heavy drinking contest but turned it out, much to Stalin's surprise, that Winston was no stranger to the bottle and could match him drink for drink the entire night.
He also loved American Wild West movies and forcing his politburo members to listen to his bizarre music/sound tastes (dogs barking was apparently one of his favorites). If you didn’t show up to party, you could be expected to have a much lower life expectancy.
Sounds like every Korean after work dinner
They used to have the secretaries water the booze down. He did this because he was a paranoid fuck and figured a drunken man couldn't keep his lies straight and they'd eventually put themselves as traitors of they were shit faced enough.
Not a bad plan, but you can also try not being a genocidal prick towards your own people.
The excessive drinking also led to public humiliation for Politburo members who,s could not keep up