In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev launched his anti-alcohol campaign and ordered the destruction of vineyards across the entire Soviet Union. Vineyards that had survived for more than a century were torn up and bulldozed into the earth. Vodka production fell to a third of its previous level. Over the next three years, the Soviet budget lost nearly fifty billion rubles—roughly one-fifth of state revenue.

Many historians have argued that this loss of income became one of the causes of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Gorbachev had wanted to reduce the country’s dependence on vodka. Instead, he brought down the state that depended on it. But that was only the end of a much longer story.

Vodka’s history did not begin on the dining table. It began in the pharmacy. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Arab alchemists developed the technique of distillation, which eventually reached Europe through the monasteries. In the lands of Poland and Rus, monks applied the method to fermented grain—rye, wheat, and barley.

The product had many names: bread wine, hora, okovita, derived from the Latin aqua vita, meaning water of life. It was used as medicine, as an antiseptic for wounds, as a pain reliever, and as a remedy for colds, joint pain, and stomach ailments. The first written mention of vodka in Russian documents dates to 1405. Polish chronicles record it even earlier, and that fact has fueled a centuries-long dispute over its true origin.

Poland insists vodka is Polish. Russia insists it is Russian. Sweden occasionally joins the debate. In 1977, the Soviet Union and Poland came close to taking the dispute to international arbitration.

Officially, the question remains unsettled to this day. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, vodka was not yet a drink of the masses. It was expensive, produced in small quantities, and available mainly to the elite and the clergy. That changed as the state became involved—and the state became involved because it saw money in it.

Ivan IV, known to history as Ivan the Terrible, ruled Russia from 1547 to 1584. He was a man of remarkable political skill, deeply suspicious, and his continuous military campaigns always demanded money. The Oprichnina, the Livonian War, the conquest of the Kazan Khanate—all required enormous sums. Around the 1550s, Ivan established a system of state taverns called kabaks, which held a monopoly on vodka sales.

The first royal kabak opened in Moscow around 1552, shortly after the capture of Kazan. Private vodka sales were forbidden. Production outside the state system was forbidden. The entire vodka business, from grain to glass, came under government control.

It was both ingenious and ruthless. The state collected revenue from vodka sales, and that revenue did not depend on harvests, trade routes, or the goodwill of foreign partners. People drank in good times and in famine, in peace and in war. Vodka revenue was more reliable than any other source of income.

By the end of the sixteenth century, about a third of Russia’s total state revenue came from vodka sales. The kabaks were run harshly. There was no food for sale, only vodka. Customers could not leave with half a bottle; everything had to be consumed on the spot.

Tavern keepers had sales targets and encouraged drinking by every means. A government that spoke publicly of morality had built a system that systematically destroyed it, knowing that a drunk subject pays more and asks fewer questions. That system survived Ivan’s death. It survived several changes of dynasty.

In one form or another, it persisted in Russia into the Soviet era. But the next ruler who turned vodka into something extraordinary came a century after Ivan and loomed even larger in history. Peter the Great took the throne in 1682 and devoted himself entirely to the work he intended to do, on a scale of construction, war, and expenditure that astonished even his closest advisors. A navy, a modern army, a new capital, European dress for the boyars, shaved faces instead of traditional Russian beards—all of it required enormous wealth.

Peter imposed a tax on beards. It sounds like a joke, but it is a historical fact. Nobles and merchants who wished to keep their beards had to pay an annual fee and carry a token as proof of payment. Peasants paid for the right to keep their beards when entering the city.

That money went into the treasury, and the treasury funded wars and construction. The building of Saint Petersburg, raised on swampland at the cost of thousands of lives, was financed partly by vodka revenue and partly by paying workers directly in vodka. The laborers who dug the canals, laid the foundations of the palaces, and died of malaria in the marshes received part of their wages in vodka. It was not an act of generosity.

It was an economic necessity. The Russian monetary system was still underdeveloped, and vodka was a liquid, universally recognized asset that could be used as money almost anywhere. Peter’s army also received official vodka rations, intended to keep soldiers warm in the harsh climate and boost morale. Informally, it served as a means of keeping an armed population manageable.

The victory at Poltava in 1709, one of the greatest military triumphs in Russian history, was won by an army that regularly received state vodka rations. Peter died in 1725 of kidney disease, likely aggravated by the excessive drinking of the court he had himself shaped. The man who used vodka as a tool of state-building ultimately became its victim. His state monopoly on vodka survived for decades after his death.

The most troubling thing the state would do with vodka and the people who drank it came in the twentieth century. By then the government had changed, armed itself with different tools, and operated on colder calculations. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union was going through collectivization, the dekulakization campaign, and the first five-year plan. People were hungry, exhausted, and living under constant pressure from the state.

Discontent was widespread, but expressing it was impossible and dangerous. At that moment, Soviet leadership made a decision that is now documented. Vodka production was deliberately increased. Its price was lowered to make it accessible to the poorest citizens.

The network of state liquor stores was expanded. It was not an accident and not the result of market economics. It was a political decision from the highest level. The reasoning was simple and cruel: a drunk person is less likely to organize resistance.

Money spent on vodka is not spent on freedom. A person dependent on state vodka is dependent on the state. A government that controls the only easily available source of comfort can control the population more effectively than any police force. Stalin is often quoted as saying that vodka was not merely a drink but a means of governing the masses.

The quotation is not fully confirmed, but the policies of the time prove the point themselves. In the 1930s and 1940s, about twenty-five percent of total Soviet revenue came from vodka, much the same as in the era of Ivan the Terrible. The Soviet government did not invent the system. It simply inherited it and added a new ideological framework.

It remained in effect through Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Vodka was comparatively cheap because the state deliberately kept the price low. In every neighborhood of every Soviet city, there were special state shops called monopolka that sold only vodka and other alcohol. Long lines outside the shops on Friday mornings became so common that no one questioned why a state building communism was working so hard to make alcohol easily available.

By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was producing about two billion liters of vodka a year. Per capita alcohol consumption was among the highest in the world. Men’s average life expectancy was falling. Labor productivity was declining.

Drunkenness-related workplace accidents were increasing. The state had created a problem that now threatened the state itself. That was the moment when Gorbachev did what seemed logical to him, and set off a chain of events no one wanted. May 1985: Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party and launched the anti-alcohol campaign.

A decree against drunkenness and alcoholism was signed that year, and what followed was sweeping and disastrous. Vodka production was cut by nearly two-thirds. Alcohol sales hours were strictly limited. In the Soviet republics with long wine-making traditions—Georgia, Moldova, Crimea—bulldozers tore up vineyards fifty to a hundred years old.

News footage showed tractors plowing under grapevines that had existed since the days of the Russian Empire. Wine makers wept openly in front of the cameras. That was not an exaggeration. The results were mixed.

On one hand, alcohol consumption dropped. Birth rates rose and alcohol-related deaths fell. These are documented facts. On the other hand, the Soviet state budget was losing about fifty billion rubles a year at a time when oil prices were falling.

It was a devastating blow. Gorbachev was forced to borrow from abroad, cut government spending, and relax state control. That weakness created the opening for glasnost and perestroika. But it also gave opportunity to the centrifugal forces that finally broke the Soviet Union apart in 1991.

People reacted to the prohibition the same way they had in Russia before. Home-distilling surged. Sugar disappeared from store shelves because people were using it to make alcohol at home. Colognes and industrial alcohol were drunk as substitutes.

Poisoning cases increased. A government that had tried to remove vodka from society watched as people became willing to drink almost anything instead. Historians still debate whether the anti-alcohol campaign was a cause of the Soviet collapse or merely coincided with it. But one fact remains unchanged: a state that had depended on vodka revenue for four hundred years could not survive without it even for a few years.

Ivan the Terrible understood that. Gorbachev did not. There is a story about vodka that almost everyone in the Russian-speaking world has heard. According to the legend, the great chemist Dmitri Mendeleev scientifically proved in his 1865 doctoral dissertation that the ideal strength of vodka is forty percent alcohol.

This, it is said, is why Russian vodka has historically been bottled at that proof—because Mendeleev calculated it that way. It is not true. It is an interesting, believable, and entirely fictional story. Mendeleev’s dissertation was about mixtures of alcohol and water.

It examined the physical and chemical properties of ethanol and water at various concentrations. It contained no recommendation about the ideal strength of vodka. Mendeleev was studying the densities of solutions. It was an important scientific work, but it had nothing to do with vodka.

The forty-percent standard was set not by Mendeleev but by the Russian excise law of 1894, which formalized an existing practice. The average strength of vodka produced at the time was roughly that, and it was a convenient number for tax collection. The legend of Mendeleev appeared much later, probably in the Soviet era, and survived because it was a wonderful story: a scientific justification for the country’s favorite drink. Who would not want to believe that?

The tale itself tells us something important about vodka. It had become so deeply embedded in culture that an entire mythology grew up around it. Mendeleev and vodka, Ivan the Terrible and the first state taverns, Peter the Great and the beard tax—some of these stories are true. Others are beautiful myths, and the line between them is not always easy to see.

While Soviet wine makers were mourning their vineyards, another struggle was brewing on the other side of the world: a legal battle that lasted decades and was almost absurd in its own way. Poland claimed that vodka had been invented in Poland in the eighth or ninth century. Russia insisted it had been invented in Russia in the ninth or tenth century. Both sides presented historical documents.

Both challenged the validity of the other’s evidence. Both hired historians who produced new arguments supporting their claims. In 1977, the Soviet Union asked an international trade body for formal recognition of vodka as a Russian invention and legal protection of the name based on geographical origin, like champagne and cognac. Poland immediately filed a counterclaim.

The negotiations dragged on for years and produced no resolution. In 2013, the European Union registered Polish vodka as a protected geographical indication, meaning only vodka produced in Poland from Polish grain or potatoes could legally be called Polish vodka. Russia was displeased but took no legal action. In practical terms, both identities exist side by side.

Legally, the question of vodka’s true origin remains unresolved. Sweden occupies a unique position in the dispute. Absolut, one of the world’s largest vodka brands, is marketed as Swedish vodka and has been produced in the town of Åhus since 1879. The Swedes do not claim to have invented vodka.

They simply make it and sell it around the world. Perhaps profiting from the present rather than arguing about the past is the wiser course. In 1997, an American entrepreneur named Sidney Frank, then seventy-five years old and known as an importer of the German liqueur Jägermeister, introduced Grey Goose vodka. Surprisingly, it was produced in the Cognac region of France.

Frank believed that a French-made product sounded more prestigious than one from Russia or Sweden. From the start, it was positioned as an ultra-premium product. Advertisements ran in magazines read by wealthy customers. Its price was set at about double that of competitors—not because production costs were higher, but because the high price itself was a powerful marketing signal of quality.

It sounds simple. In reality, it was a revolutionary move that changed the entire spirits industry. Before Grey Goose, vodka was seen as a cheap, neutral drink. Colorless, odorless, tasteless.

Its value lay in its strength and affordability. Why would anyone pay more for something that was by definition indistinguishable? Frank completely changed the answer to that question. The question was no longer just about the drink.

It was about what your choice of drink said about you. Ordering Grey Goose at an upscale bar became a symbol of status. People were no longer paying for taste. They were paying for identity.

In 2004, Frank sold the Grey Goose brand to Bacardi for two billion dollars. He had spent about eight million dollars building it. That was a return of two hundred fifty times his investment in just seven years, one of the most successful examples of building a luxury consumer brand from nothing. Today, the premium vodka market is one of the fastest-growing segments of the global spirits industry.

A drink that is chemically neutral and nearly identical, regardless of brand, sells for anywhere from five dollars to five hundred dollars a bottle. The main difference is marketing, nothing else. Ivan the Terrible, who turned vodka into a state monopoly, would probably have appreciated the strategy. Vodka’s history is the story of how governments have used addiction as a tool of control.

Ivan the Terrible understood that in the sixteenth century and built a monopoly that paid for his wars. Peter the Great used vodka as a currency to build an empire. The Soviet government increased vodka production deliberately whenever it needed to make the population more obedient. And when Gorbachev tried to break that relationship, the state lost a third of its revenue and began to fall apart.

But there is another side to the story. Vodka was not only a tool of the state. It was also a tool of resistance. Home-distilled alcohol, banned under every regime, was never fully stopped.

The very people the state tried to control through vodka often escaped that control by making their own. It was a small victory, rarely written into history, but it happened again and again. Gorbachev did not fail because vodka was stronger than freedom. He failed because he did not understand that a state’s main instrument of control cannot simply be removed without replacing it with something else.

A government built on vodka revenue cannot just stop selling vodka. It would first have to become a government that depends on something else. The Soviet Union never became that kind of state, and in 1991 it ceased to exist. Today the global vodka market is worth about forty billion dollars a year.

Russia remains the world’s largest consumer. Poland is one of the largest exporters. Sweden sells Absolut in more than 140 countries. Grey Goose is made in France and marketed as a symbol of American success.

Few people think of Ivan the Terrible when they open a bottle. But the relationship between vodka and state power has never disappeared. It has simply moved out of sight. That, too, is a lesson of this history: the most effective tools of control are often the ones we do not notice.

In 1997, Sidney Frank saw what his predecessors had understood in their own way: people do not really pay for the drink itself. They pay for what the drink says about them. Mendeleev never recommended forty percent alcohol. Yet someone decided the story sounded better that way.

The history of vodka is a collection of such stories, in which a simple transparent drink became a mirror for human beliefs about power, money, status, and freedom—and those beliefs rarely matched reality. Vodka is clear. Its history is not. The real lesson of the vodka story is that it was never really about the drink.

It was about the people who made it, controlled it, sold it, and drank it—and about the governments that understood, sometimes too late, exactly how much they depended on it.