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.
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