PODLESNAYA TAVLA, Russia--Here is a desperate recipe:
Take an old Russian washing machine, toss in a few ounces
of yeast, a 22-pound sack of sugar, a gallon of fresh milk
and 10 gallons of water, churn the brew for two hours and
distill.
If this method for instant homemade vodka fails to produce
the desired effect, there is an answer in every Russian
village.
In Podlesnaya Tavla, 330 miles southeast
of Moscow, you just call on the woman known as Auntie
Masha. One step inside her cheerful, spotless kitchen
and it is obvious why hers is the most knocked-on door:
the raw, yeasty fumes of homemade moonshine.
In rural Russia few can afford vodka,
but everyone can get samogon, or moonshine.
The recipe for samogon in three hours
comes from a slim pink booklet containing 140 moonshine
recipes, including alcohol made from tea, bread, rice,
potatoes, beet root or other staples. Ostap Bender, a
favorite rascal in Russian fiction, said you could even
make samogon from a taburetka—a wooden stool.
In villages where almost nothing else
pays, samogon turns a tidy profit. When demand is buoyant--on
holidays and weekends, for example--Auntie Masha can sell
as many as 38 pints a day of samogon, which would gobble
up 44 pounds of sugar and 4.4 pounds of yeast for her
recipe. That brings in $25, leaving Auntie Masha $14.50
after expenses.
Because of the risk of a fine--about $350--she
declined to give her last name.
On a recent frosty morning, the sun peering
wanly through her kitchen window, Auntie Masha bustled
about snatching glasses, matches and a great rock of homemade
bread. She poured a lick of the cold spirit onto her table
and carefully ignited it, smiling proudly as a flame leaped
up like a blue imp. If the liquor is less than 80 proof,
it won't burn.
"You know it's good quality if your
head feels clear but your feet are uncertain," said
Auntie Masha, 62, a lively woman with jolly apple cheeks,
plump fingers, dancing eyes and an infectious laugh. The
shelves in her kitchen stand as crooked as a drunken customer.
Auntie Masha's still, a gift from a relative
who made it at work, is a rustic stove-top vat connected
to a fat pipe spiraling into a bucket. The fermented brew
of sugar and yeast is heated to boiling; the steam passes
through cold water and condenses as samogon.
To be safe, she keeps the big vat concealed
behind a curtain in the bedroom. She removed the cover,
calling for quiet to let the fermenting brew speak: a
faint tickling sound as the bubbles rose. Strings of brownish
yeast floated on the surface.
Long Line of Brewers in Auntie Masha's
Family
"People have been brewing their own
samogon since time immemorial: my mother and her mother
and grandmother," she said.
In the Brezhnev era, from the mid-1960s
to the early 1980s, family members risked jail terms of
several years making black market samogon. "It was
really strict then. We would fill our vats, load them
on a horse and cart, haul them off into the woods and
hide them there," she recalled.
With his political reforms during the
1980s, former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev introduced
a nationwide crackdown on alcohol, but that didn't stop
people from brewing their own.
"We paid no attention. We kept on
going, quietly. We can't live without alcohol, and we
can't afford vodka," she explained.
Her samogon sells for about 70 cents for
a half-liter, compared with about $1.25 for the cheapest
commercial vodka available there.
Potatoes were used in the past by samogon
makers only in desperate times because "you drink
a whole bottle of potato vodka and never get drunk,"
said Auntie Masha. Nor does she labor over beet root samogon,
which has to be repeatedly filtered through washed charcoal
until "it comes out as clear as a child's tears."
For some villagers, samogon is reserved
for visitors and special occasions; for others, it is
the string they thread their days on.
Auntie Masha has no shortage of customers.
Some locals put the number of people who drink to excess
in the village as high as 50%, though Podlesnaya Tavla
is considered no worse than other villages here in the
republic of Mordovia, or indeed throughout rural Russia.
About three dozen men in the village do
mostly seasonal work for the collective farm and get paid
in samogon, grain and food. Dmitry Fedoseyev, spokesman
for the Mordovia Interior Ministry, said farm workers
are often paid in sugar for harvesting sugar beet.
"So they use sugar to make moonshine,
and then moonshine plays the role of hard currency. For
example, if a babushka wanted her neighbor to fix her
well or roof, she would pay him with a bottle of moonshine,"
he said. "Practically everyone makes samogon."
Many vodka plants work at less than half
their capacity because they can't compete with samogon,
according to one local official.
Samogon consumption nationwide grew dramatically
when living standards slumped after the 1991 collapse
of the Soviet Union. The Mordovia regional administration
budget was hard hit. In the 1980s, taxes on vodka sales
financed about 36% of its budget; now they provide less
than 2%.
The administration began fighting back
in 1996 with a crackdown on moonshine, but samogon defies
controls.
Auntie Masha believes that the police
are not as vigilant now as in the Brezhnev and Gorbachev
eras.
"The people responsible for implementing
the anti-alcohol campaign live here, and all they care
about is being drunk," she said, laughing.
The Many Faces of Moonshiners
In rural Russia, distilling samogon is
not limited to the fringes. Respectable people of all
ages, even elderly women with religious icons in the corner,
will show off their stills--usually eccentric apparatuses
with pipes, hoses and little spouts where the spirit drips
out into waiting buckets.
Among them is Ulyana Ryabov, 70, who lives
alone and does not drink but fires up her still occasionally
to have samogon on hand for visitors or family.
Below her peeling wallpaper, surrounded
by stiff photographic portraits from the past, she drew
up stools to a rough wooden table and poured shots of
caustic samogon, accompanied by sliced onions and pickled
cucumbers.
Her husband died 31 years ago of kidney
disease at 49. He could park a car straighter when drunk
than sober, she said, her lighthearted tone belying the
serious domestic problems his drinking caused.
"He loved samogon and was very rowdy.
He was the life of the party, and we always had guests.
And I was rowdy too. I used to have two balalaikas,"
she said, referring to a traditional Russian musical instrument.
Health Ministry statistics indicate that
alcohol is a more serious problem in the country than
in cities. In 1999, 156,000 people nationwide died of
alcohol-related diseases. The mortality rate among rural
men was 47.9 per 100,000, compared with 42.4 among urban
men. The average rate among Russian women was 10 per 100,000.
Russia's health authorities routinely
issue warnings against drinking samogon, with 30,000 alcohol
poisoning deaths in 1999 from drinking contaminated moonshine
or vodka. Fedoseyev said some people add chicken droppings
or tobacco to make samogon stronger, which often cause
poisonings.
Such deaths only make Auntie Masha's product
more attractive to her buyers. "We do our job honestly,"
she boasted. "People know that if they drink what
we sell, they won't poison themselves."
But Ryabov's sons are not among those
who line up regularly at Auntie Masha's door. Alexander
and his two brothers rarely drink because they saw what
alcohol did to their father.
"We saw what happened at home. We
knew family relationships would be better without drinking
samogon," he said.
Drunkenness was such a big problem in
the village, he and his mother said, that some people
couldn't cut and cart the firewood to run their wood stove
for heat and cooking to survive the long winter.
"People get lost in life. If they
don't know where to stop, their work doesn't get done.
If you have a cow and live alone, you have to hack wood,
light the stove and get up very early to milk the cow,"
Ulyana Ryabov said. "We don't help those who drink."
For Auntie Masha, it is not just the responsibility
of her cow, two pigs, chickens and cat that keeps her
sober. She has to think about carting in the sacks of
sugar and bricks of yeast for the next vat of samogon.
Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times' Moscow
Bureau contributed to this report.
