REVIEWS 171 its Allies were able to take action to counter the Ottomans. On the receipt of such intelligence, the authorities of cities and forts along the coast accelerated the construction of fortifications, which reveals the dichotomy between the planning of these buildings and the effectiveness of their timely realization. This is a highly useful and informative study which reveals the importance of the Vatican reports in the Venetian-Ottoman Wars. An English version would reach a wide audience, and could well be expanded to include maps of the regions and locations discussed, as they are likely not to be at all familiar to the general reader. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Ozren Kosanović University of Rijeka Schrad, Mark Lawrence. Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2014. xvii + 492 pp. Map. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Index. £22.99. This is a book with a big idea. Mark Lawrence Schrad makes the ambitious claim at the outset of his work that what he calls ‘vodka politics’ — the use of alcohol as a tool of rule — has been at the heart of Russian governance for centuries. Though often noting the cultural dimension of vodka in Russian history, this is, at heart, a political book. Vodka politics, Schrad claims, was the ‘state’s subjugation of society through alcohol’ (p. xiii). This argument is pursued throughout the work, wrapped around a series of sometimes amusing vignettes that trace Russian history from the time of Ivan the Terrible to the present day. Schrad shows how, through different regimes and the rules of successive autocrats, vodka politics remained a constant presence, and alcohol formed a key part of the culture of Russian high politics. Not only this, but it was used to enforce compliance in the masses, particularly through taxation and the establishment of cultural institutions such as taverns and pubs that disseminatedaproductmakingthepopulationeasiertocontrol.Thiscontention might seem a stretch, but these points are often well founded. In a particularly strong chapter on the economic impact of vodka in late tsarist Russia, Schrad examines the importance of vodka as a source of tax revenue. This is a crucial point: towards the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, taxes from vodka sales formed around 30 per cent of the total tax revenues of the Russian state (pp. 112–14). Without vodka taxes, the state would have functioned far less effectively — if, indeed, it could have functioned at all. This aspect led to an especially curious feature, and one that recurs throughout the narrative. Though Russia tried to modernize, ‘if the state promoted the health and well-being of its citizens, it faced financial ruin’ (p. 119). SEER, 94, 1, JANUARY 2016 172 The cultural implications of vodka for Russian culture will be obvious to many readers but, even so, these are examined to good effect in Schrad’s book. The work discusses the relationship of vodka with some of the most famous figures of Russian high culture, such as Tolstoi, Dostoevskii and even the proto-revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevskii. Certainly, as an examination of the cultural impact of alcohol in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and the use of vodka as part of the retinue of Russian governance, the narrative is mostly convincing. Schrad’s lively writing and ability to choose a telling episode to illustrate his point means that the work is never dull. This book is obviously aimed at a wide readership, and given Schrad’s accessible style it should be entirely successful in this aim. However, his desire to continually hammer home the importance of alcohol to Russian rule means that the central argument can occasionally appear slightly overwrought: one example of this is his claim that ‘vodka politics was the central principle of autocratic statecraft’ (p. 170). Clearly, alcohol has played a significant role in Russian cultural life, and in the personal lives of some of its leaders but, to take this argument to extremes, would the trajectory of Russian history have been significantly different without vodka politics? Would the Revolutions of 1917 have remained pipedreams, the Five-Year Plans unrealized, and the Gulag unfulfilled without it...