In his new book, Whites & Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar, Stephen Bittner asks his readers to rethink the role of drink in Russian history by focusing on the development of a domestic wine industry. While he acknowledges that vodka remained the drink of choice for most Russians throughout its history, he argues that wine and winemaking have played a critical role in the development of Russian/Soviet identities. His book covers the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries with a brief conclusion about post-Soviet Russia; each chapter focuses on a particular issue within this chronological frame. The historical sweep of Whites & Reds allows Bittner to point out some unexpected continuities between the tsarist and the socialist wine industries.

One of these continuities was the deep association of wine with being civilized, or in Soviet terms, kul΄turnyi. Although wine drinking was not unheard of in Muscovy, it was Peter the Great who brought wine, winemaking, and the cultural assumptions that undergirded the production and consumption of the drink to Russia as part of his Westernization reforms. Individuals who drank wine were “civilized”—they had the time and money to appreciate and savor the finer things in life. In imperial Russia, this included the imperial court and wealthy aristocrats who established wineries on their vast estates located in southern Russia's wine country as well as some smaller entrepreneurs. And yet, despite the destruction wrought by revolution and civil war, the wine industry persisted. The old estate vineyards and wineries were nationalized, but they were administered by many of the same people as before. The entire industry was given a boost when Joseph Stalin made champagne and wine part of his kul΄turnost΄ campaign in the mid-1930s. Wine consumption, this time without the aristocratic pretensions of the old regime, became once again a marker of refinement and sophistication.

And yet, while middle-brow Russians might aspire to kul΄turnost΄ or refinement by drinking wine, they disliked the actual taste of high-quality wines, another point of continuity. In both the imperial and the Soviet period, consumers preferred wines that had been “fortified,” primarily with grain alcohol and sugar. This led to constant tension between wine growers who were attempting to establish Russia as a major wine producer on the world stage, and those who were trying to cater to consumer tastes. This tension lasted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as vintners struggled to produce prizewinning wines at international exhibitions while fortified wines had a firm grip on the Russian domestic market. Bittner concludes that it is only in post-Soviet Russia that a growing number of consumers have learned to appreciate unadulterated wines.

A third point of continuity in Whites & Reds is the central role that imperialism played in the wine industry. Russia's viniculture was located in the Russian south—in territories that the Russian army conquered over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Bessarabia, southern Ukraine, Crimea and the Black Sea Coast, the Caucasus) which were not part of the central Russian core. Long before Russian annexation, these lands had developed their own wine cultures and winemaking techniques. With the conquest of the Russian south, the Russians, like other imperial powers, looked down on local winemaking and tried to impose European techniques and cultural assumptions upon these “uncultured” peoples and their backward viniculture. According to Bittner, this superior attitude toward non-Russian winemaking persisted well into the Soviet period. This important observation remained a bit underdeveloped, however. More about the differences between elite and non-elite wine production and how they furthered negative stereotypes of non-Russians would have helped clarify what it was specifically about wine and its production that sustained these images. Or was it that Russia acting as an imperial power would have reacted the same no matter how the Bessarabians, Tatars, or Georgians grew their grapes and tended their vines?

Bittner's deeply researched and cogently argued book is a major contribution to Russian and Soviet historiography. It not only explains the development of a domestic wine industry in Russia and the Soviet Union, but it elucidates the outsized role wine played in creating Russian and Soviet identities.