A better approach is for gay activists in Russia and their allies abroad to link the (otherwise unpopular) cause of gay equality to problems that have a broader resonance in Russia, like endemic corruption and the weak rule of law.
The Kremlin is no friend to gays, but a symbolic and ineffective boycott won’t help. Mendeleev fled Russia years ago, as did many oligarchs who opposed Mr. Savage notes that SPI is owned by Yuri Scheffler, a tycoon. SPI’s chief executive, Val Mendeleev, has bent over backward to condemn the antigay legislation. Unfortunately, the Stoli we drink is distilled in Latvia and owned by the SPI Group, based in Luxembourg, as opposed to the (cheaper, less venerated) Stoli consumed in Russia, made by a struggling state-owned company, FKP Soyuzplodoimport. Stolichnaya has been the primary target - the Hotel Moskva on its label has been almost synonymous with Russia since 1972, when the brand became available in America thanks to a deal that sent Pepsi into the Soviet bloc. Many bars have stopped serving Smirnoff, which was produced in the United States, not Russia, as far back as the 1930s and is now made by a British conglomerate, Diageo.
Third and most important, the Kremlin’s historic reliance on vodka revenues is largely over - making efforts to enforce the boycott ineffective and even cringeworthy.
Savage’s well-intended call for a boycott?įirst, quaffing Absolut, Belvedere or Ketel One instead of Stolichnaya is a symbolic action, like changing one’s profile picture on Facebook or sharing a YouTube video, that changes little for Russia’s gay men and lesbians. (This sort of defiance got him excommunicated.) Likewise, Soviet dissidents from Andrei Sakharov to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were teetotalers. Tolstoy formed a temperance society to promote Russians’ spiritual and material advancement against the power of the state and the church. Writers like Dostoevsky and Turgenev used vodka to highlight the backwardness and moral bankruptcy of the autocratic order. “The teetotalers were flogged into drinking some who doggedly held out had liquor poured into their mouths through funnels, and were afterward hauled off to prison as rebels,” an aghast British journalist wrote. As taverns emptied and distilleries closed, the government responded with brutality. In 1845, Frederick Douglass argued that getting slaves drunk was “the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection.”Ī world away, in 1858-9, serfs from the Baltic to the Volga boycotted vodka plied by the state. Vodka and the Kremlin have indeed had a long history of codependency.ĭissenters everywhere have long recognized alcohol’s oppressive capacity. And to the extent that Russia becomes more xenophobic and reactionary, its gay community will be seen as only more alien - the opposite of tolerance and integration.Īs a scholar of Russian politics, I arrive at this conclusion with ambivalence. Putin, who can portray himself as the defender of the traditional Russian family, Orthodox Christian values and national pride all at once. In that conservative context, a perceived threat, even symbolic, from the liberal West would be a blessing for Mr. Polls estimate that two-thirds of Russians consider homosexuality unacceptable under any circumstance, similar to where American attitudes were three decades ago. It’s an understandable response, but the prospects for the boycott’s succeeding are slim, and the potential for it to backfire on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Russians is high. AMERICA’S favorite sex-and-relationships columnist, Dan Savage, has called for a boycott of Russian vodka to protest violent attacks on gays by nationalist thugs and antigay legislation backed by President Vladimir V.