How Wine Almost Compromised the Russian Revolution

In the autumn of 1917, the Russian Revolution nearly drowned — not in blood, but in wine. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, they inherited the Tsar’s spectacular imperial wine cellars, and the drunken chaos that followed grew so severe that Lenin’s new government feared it might undo the entire revolution¹.

The Tsar’s dry empire

The strange story begins with abstinence. In 1914, hoping to keep his army sober for the First World War, Tsar Nicholas II banned the sale of vodka — a drink so central to Russian life that the ban wiped out roughly a third of state revenue and helped destabilise the regime he was trying to strengthen². Yet while ordinary Russians went dry, the imperial cellars beneath the Winter Palace still held one of the greatest wine collections on Earth, some bottles a century old.

Raid the cellars

When the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in November 1917, its cellars became an irresistible target. What followed were the “wine pogroms”: soldiers, sailors and workers broke into the vaults and drank on a colossal scale, firing their guns in celebration, collapsing in the snow, and roving the streets in a haze³. The looting spread from cellar to cellar across the city, and for weeks Petrograd dissolved into a vast, armed, drunken riot — a threat the new regime took deadly seriously.

Wine in the river

The Bolsheviks tried everything to stop it. They posted guards — who got drunk too. They declared martial law. In desperation they tried to destroy the wine itself, pumping it out of the cellars and letting it run into the Neva — only to find crowds gathered at the drains, scooping it up. Red wine ran through the gutters, and eventually the authorities resorted to force, firing machine guns into the cellars to smash the bottles and end the madness⁴.

Red wine ran down the gutters of Petrograd like blood.— the wine pogroms of 1917⁴

The greatest hangover

The scale was staggering. Millions of rubles’ worth of irreplaceable vintages were destroyed, and some historians argue the wine pogroms killed more people than the actual fighting for power⁵. It is one of history’s strangest ironies that a revolution which reshaped the twentieth century nearly foundered on a wine cellar. And among the countless Russians whose lives were upended by that chaos was a young officer named André Tchelistcheff — who would flee it all and, decades later, become the father of modern Napa Valley wine.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• André Tchelistcheff, who fled this revolution
• When the Nazis looted Europe’s cellars
• Prohibition and the war on drink

References

1. TIME — Did Vodka Cause the Russian Revolution? ↑
2. Russia Beyond — When the Tsar Banned Booze. ↑
3. World of Fine Wine — Wine in History: Raid the Cellars! ↑
4. Saint Petersburg Guide — The Looting of the Winter Palace, 1917. ↑
5. Springer (David Christian / Patricia Herlihy) — The Russian Vodka Prohibition of 1914 and Its Consequences. ↑

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine

Hugh Johnson

Places the destruction of Russia’s imperial cellars within the wider drama of wine and history.

A Short History of Wine

Rod Phillips

Strong on wine, drink and the great political upheavals of the twentieth century.

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