And there was another phenomenon, one that reverberated deep in our imagination: Petlya Gorbacheva (Gorbachev’s Noose). The popular moniker for the vodka lines.

They were astonishing. Enormous. And they were blamed entirely on the Party’s general (generalny) secretary, now dubbed the mineral (mineralny) secretary for his crusade to replace booze with mineral water. Even the abstemious leader himself would later amusedly cite a widespread gag from that very dry period.

“I’m gonna go kill that Gorbachev motherfucker!” yells a guy in the vodka line. Hours later he comes slumping back. “The line at the Kremlin to kill him was even longer.”

The joke barely conveys the popular wrath over Gorbachev’s antialcohol drive.

At a mobbed, shoddy liquor shop near our former Arbat apartment, Mom and I watched a bedraggled old woman with the bluish complexion of a furniture-polish imbiber. Theatrically she flashed open her filthy coat of fake fur. Underneath she was naked.

“Pila, pyu i budu pit’!” she howled. (I drank, I drink, I will drink!)

On the faces of fellow vodka queuers I noted that existential, sodden Russian compassion.

The trouble in the alcoholic empire had started in May 1985. Just two months in office, Gorbach (the hunchback) issued a decree entitled On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism. It was his first major policy innovation—and so calamitous that his reputation inside the Soviet Union never recovered.

The mineral secretary was of course right about Soviet drinking being a social catastrophe. Pre-perestroika statistics were secret and scant, but it’s been estimated that alcohol abuse caused more than 90 percent of the empire’s petty hooliganism, nearly 70 percent of its murders and rapes, and almost half of its divorces—not to mention the extremely disturbing mortality rates. Perhaps a full-scale prohibition would have had some effect. Instead, Gorbachev promulgated the typical half measures that ultimately made him so reviled by Russians. In a nutshell: after 1985 drinking simply became more expensive, complicated, and time-consuming.

Vodka factories and liquor stores were shut, vineyards bulldozed, excessive boozing harshly punished. The sclerotic state sorely needed cash—among other things, to clean up the Chernobyl disaster—but it gave up roughly nine billion rubles a year from alcohol sales. Such sales, under the mineral secretary, took place only after two p.m. on workdays. Meaning the hungover workforce had to maneuver more skillfully than ever between the workplace and the liquor line.

Not the most efficient way to combat alcohol-related loss of productivity.

We had arrived in Moscow in late December. Getting booze for the holidays ranked at the top of everyone’s concerns. New Year’s festivities were about to commence, but store shelves were barren of that Soviet good-times icon: Sovetskoye champagne. Baking, too, was a wash: yeast and sugar had completely vanished, hoarded for samogon (moonshine). Fruit juices, cheapo pudushechki candies, and tomato paste had evaporated as well. Resourceful Soviet drinkers could distill hooch from anything. Kap-kap-kap. Drip-drip-drip.

Trudging around snowy, parched perestroika Moscow, Mom and I kept dropping into liquor lines to soak up alcoholic political humor. The venom poured out where vodka didn’t.

At the draconian penalties for consuming on the job: The boss is screwing his secretary. Masha, he whispers, go open the door—wide—so people don’t suspect we’re in here drinking.

At the price hikes: Kid to dad: On TV, they’re saying vodka will become more expensive, Papa. Does it mean you’ll drink less? No, son, says Papa, it means you’ll eat less.

At the effect of the antialcohol drive: Gorbach visits a factory. See, comrades, could you work like this after a bottle? Sure. After two? Yup. All right, five? Well, you see we’re working!

To properly grasp the social and political disaster of Gorbachev’s Noose, you have to appreciate Russia’s long-soaked, -steeped, and -saturated history with vodka. So allow me to put our blissful family reunion into a state of suspended animation—befitting our fairy-tale visit—while I try to explain why our Rodina can only really be understood v zabutylie (through a bottle).

Booze, as every Russian child, man, and dog knows, was the reason pagan Slavs became Christian. With the first millennium approaching, Grand Prince Vladimir of Rus decided to adopt a monotheistic religion. He began receiving envoys promoting their faiths. Geopolitically, Islam made good sense. But it banned alcohol! Whereupon Vladimir uttered his immortal line, “Drinking is the joy of the Rus, we can’t go without it.” So in 988 A.D. he adopted Byzantine Orthodox Christianity.

The story might be apocryphal, but it puts a launch date on our Rodina’s path to the drunk tank.

Originally Russians tippled mead, beer, and kvass (a lightly alcoholic fermented refreshment). Serious issues with zeleny zmey (the green serpent) surfaced sometime in the late-fourteenth century when distilled grain spirits arrived on the scene. Called variously “bread wine” or “green wine” or “burnt wine,” these drinkables later became known as vodka, a diminutive of voda (water).

Diminutive in name, a permanent spring flood in impact.

Vodka’s revenue potential caught the czars’ eyes early. By the mid-seventeenth century the state held a virtual monopoly on distilling and selling, and for most of the nineteenth century, one third of public monies derived from liquor sales. Then came the First World War. The hapless czar Nicholas II put his empire on the wagon, fearful of the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War a decade earlier, a humiliation blamed on the sodden state of the military. Bad move. Nikolai’s booze ban starved Russia’s wartime coffers; the resulting epidemic of illicit moonshining destabilized the crucial grain market. Grain shortages led to hunger; hunger led to revolution. (Perhaps the mineral secretary in the twilight of his own crumbling empire might have paid closer attention to history?)

Even so, the Bolsheviks were no fans of vodka, and they initially kept up prohibition. Lenin, who occasionally indulged in white wine or a Munich pilsner while in exile, insisted the Russian proletariat had “no need of intoxication,” and deplored his utopian State trading in “rot-gut.” The proletariat, however, felt differently. Deprived of vodka, it got blasted into oblivion on samogon supplied by the peasantry, who preferred to divert their scarce, precious grain and bread reserves to illegal distilling rather than surrender them to the requisitioning Reds. The samogon flood overwhelmed the sandbags. By the mid-1920s a full state liquor monopoly was once again in effect.

The monopoly’s most ardent advocate? One Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. “Socialism can’t be built with white gloves,” he hectored diffident comrades at a 1925 Party congress. With no other source of capital, liquor sales could and should provide a temporary cash cow. The “temporary” ran on and on, financing the lion’s share of Stalin’s roaring industrialization, and later, military defense.

World War II descended; Russia boozed on. A classic fixture of wartime lore was the “commissar’s 100 grams”—the vodka ration for combatants (about a large glass) prescribed by Grandpa Naum’s Leningrad protector, the bumbling commissar of defense, Klim Voroshilov. On the home front, too, vodka kept flowing. Despite massive price hikes, it provided one sixth of state income in 1944 and 1945—the beleaguered empire’s biggest single revenue source.