Drunk History

Chapter one of Mark Schrad’s new book opens with a gut-wrenching episode of state brutality. It’s 1859 in Spassk, Russia, and the tsar himself has dispatched the military to put down a protest of rebellious serfs. Gen. Yegor Petrovich Tolstoy responds ruthlessly, ordering imprisonment, court-martial, hourslong beatings, running of the gantlet, forced labor, and exile to Siberia for the noncompliant. This violent abuse of serfs in the Russian empire is not surprising, but for modern readers, the motivation for their protest likely is. The act of civil disobedience that brought the wrath of the state upon them was their refusal to drink alcohol.