Our man in Moscow samples 11 premium brands in one wild night.
by Brett Forrest
The First Nip
It was time to confront the fear. Thanks to a dare from vanityfair.com, there were 11 bottles of vodka in the freezer. When I nervously took a peek at them, I noticed that the freezer’s pall of frost had obscured the Cyrillic on their labels in a thick, crystalline haze. I was going to need some help.
The doorbell rang, and I welcomed a few friends into my apartment in a Brezhnev-era high-rise in central Moscow. They had arrived to lend a gullet in taste-testing the new breed of Russia’s premium vodkas. The editorial rationale? In the last several years Russia has seen a remarkable elevation in the status of its national drink, as a slew of premium brands has created an entirely new market for pricey vodka. And Moscow and St. Petersburg, Eastern Europe’s 21st-century capitals of wealth and decadence, are the places where these spirits are consumed with greatest enthusiasm.
The editorial challenge? How to consume 11 bottles of high-end firewater. Firewater is what vodka has always been, devoid of the oaken lineage of its darker cousinsand the high-nosed finery that can too easily get in the way of a good drunk. One does not inhale vodka’s bouquet, but one may use vodka to sterilize a wound on the knee, as familiar a sight to the serious vodka drinker as the shot glass and the handful of ibuprofen. That’s precisely where my friends Vika, Olga, and Arkady came in, to share the heavy load.
The Big Picture
Vodka is as simple as it is clear. Making it requires minimal technology. Aging does not improve it. Any difference in quality comes from the purity of the water and the alcohol, and from the manner and amount of filtration. Vodka is mostly produced from neutral grain spirits, and the less color, odor, and taste it has, the purer it is. There is little room for pretense.
Vodka, in fact, is the perfect drink for Russians, a species that takes great pride in the weeklong bender, the loss of recollection that can absolve one of dreadful deeds, the smell of breada traditional chaser to the shots that can become impossible to calculate. This is the land that abstinence forgot. And no, Russians don’t go in for flavored vodkaspopular in the West, but here considered a precious conception.
However, as with everything in Russia’s cosmopolitan circles these days, vodka has joined the glamour parade. If something shines, and if that something costs a heck of a lot, Russians will be more apt to buy itat least those with money or pretension to it. These folks drink mostly Hennessy, Cristal, and other symbols of international flair. It has taken this new flight of fashionable vodkas to bring them back around to the national poison. (Per capita, Russians drink four gallons of vodka a year.) Unfortunately for the rest of the vodka-loving world, these premium Russian vodkas are hard to find outside of Russia. Other vodkas have a firm foothold in European and overseas markets, and Russians are now trying to figure out how to break into the game.
The vodka industry here is still getting its wits about it, after a decade of murder and betrayal. If you were involved in the vodka business in Russia i the 90s, locals say, you were professionally involved in the business of violent persuasion. Most, if not all, of the distilleries in Soviet times produced vodka from the same centrally mandated recipe. When the free market arrived, it was a free-for-all for the distilleries, as well as for the national distribution networks, which were just as valuable. Recipes and ingredients began to vary; new brands sprang up as the new capitalists tried to grab a share of a steady, reliable audience.
As the 90s closed out and some measure of stability descended on the country, a man named Roustam Tariko established the first high-end brand of Russian vodka. Tariko had made a fortune importing luxury goods to his native land. He was perfectly attuned to the local desire for quality and just how much people would pay to attain it. Tariko’s Russian Standard vodka became immediately popular when it appeared, in 1998, and it remains so, holding 65 percent of the premium market here. (A year after its introduction, Tariko started a bank of the same name.) Its top-end product, Imperia, debuted at a million-dollar party that Tariko threw at the Statue of Liberty last year to celebrate the arrival of this atypical immigrant, and is currently the only premium Russian vodka legally for sale in the U.S..
The two most well-known Russian vodkas available in the U.S.Smirnoff and Stolichnayahave dubious recent histories. Smirnoff, the best-selling spirit in the world, is produced by a British company, and is Russian in name alone. And Stolichnaya isn’t considered as swanky a premium brand in its home country as it is in other landsnever mind the fact that a murky trademark battle between a Russian exporter and a Dutch distiller has blurred its bona fides.
Back on home turf, many vodka-makers have followed Tariko’s example, providing fine product in fine bottles, priced well beyond the reach of the kopeck collectors who comprise the meat of Russia’s vodka-drinking public. And this is where it gets tricky, because once vodka goes glam, there goes the charm of falling on your chin, bleeding onto your shirtfront, and trying to figure out how you wound up in a shawarma kiosk with three Azeri guys and two dogs with no hair. The saving grace here is that these vodkas are the real Russian article, considered top-of-the-line here and here alone, even as their equivalentsPolish, French, Scandinavian, British, and Dutchhave won firm footing in New York, L.A., and other places where people think they know it all.
The Test
Once I grabbed my notebook and my guests were seated in the loge, things began politely enough. Everyone’s clothes were still on. The neighbors had not yet called to complain about the music, nor had they been bullied into a panicked retreat. The vodka poured out in a thick, fine-looking, chilled syrup.
Putinka Limited Edition
The first bottle cracked was the oddest of all, for it was called Putinka, after the Russian president. Putinka’s owners claim that Vladimir V. Putin himself holds no interest in the drink, that the name is the product of a public solicitation. This has not stopped anti-Kremlin protesters from carrying bottles of this vodka during marches, raising it high among the banners. But Putinka’s P.R. man was eager to dispel the rumored connection. “It’s not like you’re drinking Putin,” he politely explained. “You don’t want to drink Putin.” Ah, but to pretend. The Leader of All the Russiasas the czar used to be knownwent down hard, not smooth, as could be expected. The aftertaste was metallic, much like you would notice after having a gun barrel stuck in your maw. One of our group, Arkay, remarked that Ukraine and Georgia were already familiar with this taste. GRADE: C
Etalon
Next up was Etalon, which means “echelon,” or “standard.” This vodka, introduced in 2004, is produced in Moscow’s famous state-controlled Cristall distillery (not to be confused with France’s Cristal champagne). The bottle is shaped like a pyramid, which, the company says, “accumulates special energy, which positively affects the spirit inside.” A stereogram sticker of a Kremlin tower, attached to the back of the clear glass vessel, loomed through the vodka bottle. Etalon’s makers claim that this two-dimensional image provides a useful treatment for nearsightedness, as a way to “relax tired eyes and strengthen eye muscles.” After several bouts with Putinka and Etalon, I could imagine a point in the evening where pyramids and holograms would provide the only help. Etalon vodka offered a rich, full flavor that didn’t stick around too long. Very smooth, so smooth as to demand several more pours down the same un-bumpy path. GRADE: A-
Veda Black Ice
Veda takes its name from an ancient Russian verb, vedat, meaning “to know.” By this time, it was beginning to get difficult to know anything. Veda, after Russian Standard, is the most popular premium vodka here, and Black Ice is its new top-end bottle, launched this year. This vodka is ice-filtered through a screen made of platinum, which is a word that grabs Russians’ attention. After a few drinks of this stuff, another friend, Olga, sank into the couch, able only to read the writing on the bottle, where a snake curled around a Latin motto: “Know thyself, know life.” As I poured out several more shots, I noticed someone had cranked up the music as loud as it would go. How long had it been that way? Black Ice went down dangerously well, a quick, cool splash on the tonsils, before disappearing in a short fiery burst. GRADE: A
G8
This was a great marketing coup. G8 vodka appeared in time for this past July’s G8 summit in St. Petersburg. Capitalizing on the fact that this consortium of the world’s top seven economiesplus Russiahas no official name, the makers of this vodka were free to adopt the term G8 as their own. A perfectly sneaky deed, with a bottle to match. It looks like the kind of thing you would fill with bathtub vodka, the fabled samogon. Official-looking stamps cover the label, along with the words “By Order of the Foreign Ministry for the G8.” All bogus. This was the one bottle in our test that had no plastic filter jammed into the spout. These spouts (there’s something infuriatingly childproof about them) are awful, making for slow, messy pours and lots of vain bottle-shaking. Vika would find out, however, that if one were accidentally to knock over a bottle of G8, much of the G8 would end up on the carpet. This would be a shame, since G8 vodka, a highly drinkable idea, provided a pleasant, tasteful kick that shook us from Veda’s comfortable vapors. GRADE: B
Russian Standard Imperia
The company says that Imperia’s water is extracted from the glacial Lake Ladoga, outside St. Petersburg. The spirits undergo eight distillationsdouble the Russian standard for “luxury”then two charcoal filtrations, to remove impurities, and two quartz filtrations, to “energize” the vodka. That goes a long way toward mytologizing this product, which provides the gold standard for Russian vodka, with sales exceeding one million cases a year. By the time we got around to tasting it, the neighbors had come to complain about all of the shouting, and then had run off down the hall in some kind of terror. There was a blouse balled up in the corner. Arkady parceled out shots with abandon. It may have been in my head, but Imperia actually appeared to relieve my thirst. This was the danger zone, when vodka started going down like water. GRADE: A+
Flagman Night Landing
Was that moonlight or sunlight pouring through the window? Why was there a shallow pool of vodka covering the entire glass tabletop? These questions and many others would go unanswered. It was time for Flagman, which has the distinction of being the “Official Purveyor to the Moscow Kremlin.” In his day, Stalin compelled his subordinates to work beside him late into the evening, lending them what’s known as a “Kremlin complexion.” Many more nights like this one, and we would also have pale skin, sunken eyes, and that particular stare of inner hunger. But duty called, Olga kept dancing, and Flagman, which means flagship, poured out in icy floes. A heck of a drink, good enough to penetrate this fog and leave a familiar impression of robust invincibility. GRADE: B+
There were five more bottles, countless more shots of Belaya Zolota, Parliament, Beluga, Rusky Brilliant, and Yuri Dolgoruki. But the quality of my note-keeping quickly fell off into oblivion. In the days to come, as I recovered myself and discovered my notebook in a heap of chewed gum and mysterious ash, I was able to read my final note of that evening. It went like this: “Ah & Vika,” trailing off into a vile scrawl.
And so I was left with that abbreviated evaluation of today’s new breed of premium Russian vodkas. They must be good.
Brett Forrest has written for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, ESPN The Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune.
Sigmund Freud with his wife, Martha Bernays Freud, center, and her sister, Minna Bernays, left, in 1929. (AKG-Images)
Hotel log hints at desire that Freud didn’t repress
By Ralph Blumenthal
Maybe it was just a Freudian slip. Or a case of hiding in plain sight.
Either way, Sigmund Freud, scribbling in the pages of a Swiss hotel register, appears to have left the answer to a question that has titillated scholars for much of the last century: Did he have an affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays?
Rumors of a romantic liaison between Freud and his sister-in-law, who lived with the Freuds, have long persisted, despite staunch denials by Freud loyalists. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s disciple and later his archrival, claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed to an affair to him. (The claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung’s part.) And some researchers have even theorized that she may have become pregnant by Freud and have had an abortion.
What was lacking was any proof. But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology.
A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” abbreviated German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife.”
“By any reasonable standard of proof, Sigmund Freud and his wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, had a liaison,” wrote Franz Maciejewski, a sociologist formerly at the University of Heidelberg and a specialist in psychoanalysis, who tracked down the record in August.
Freud’s wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature. The same day Freud signed the hotel ledger, he sent his wife a postcard rhapsodizing about the glaciers, mountains and lakes the pair had seen. In the card, published in Freud’s collected correspondence, he described their lodgings as “humble,” although the hotel appears to have been the second-fanciest in town.
The evidence is persuasive enough for Peter Gay, the Freud biographer and longtime skeptic on what he called “the Minna matter,” to say that he is now inclined to revise his work accordingly.
“It makes it very possible that they slept together,” he said. “It doesn’t make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct.”
The revelation is also likely to reignite a longstanding debate about Freud’s personal life. The father of psychoanalysis, whose 150th birthday was celebrated this year, plumed the darkest sexual drives and secrets of the psyche. But scholars still argue about how scrupulous Freud was in his own behavior.
Peter L. Rudnytsky, a former Fulbright/Freud Society Scholar of Psychoanalysis in Vienna and the editor of the psychoanalytic journal American Imago, said the disclosure was hardly a “so what?” matter because “psychoanalysis has such a close relationship to the life of Freud.”
“Psychoanalysis has invested a great deal in a certain idealized image of Freud,” said Dr. Rudnytsky, a professor of English at the University of Florida. “Freud dealt with issues considered suspect sexuality things that made people uncomfortable, so Freud himself had to be a figure of impeccable integrity.”
In any case, he said: “Things that happen in people’s intimate lives are important. It’s very Freudian.”
Freud himself was cryptic, writing to the American neurologist James J. Putman in 1915: “I stand for a much freer sexual life. However I have made little use of such freedom.”
Peter Swales, a historian and researcher who has spent decades uncovering details of Freud’s relationship with his sister-in-law, hailed the discovery as recognition of what he called “Minna Bernays’s central, fundamental and profound place in Freud’s intellectual biography.”
How Dr. Maciejewski discovered the hotel ledger in itself seems strangely Freudian. He spent August 2005 retracing the Swiss idyll taken by Freud and Miss Bernays for a book, published this year, on Freud’s long fixation on Moses.
While in Switzerland with Miss Bernays, Freud had trouble remembering a name. Dr. Maciejewski theorized that the lapse involved some secret guilt of Freud’s, but he could not get to the bottom of it. However, while reading the proofs of his book last spring, he said, “a feeling of you forgot something crept over me.”
In August, he returned to Maloja, and asked at the Schweizerhaus if the original guest book still existed. It did, and there, on a page from 1898, he found Freud’s entry.
Dr. Maciejewski said he came away convinced that “they not only shared a bed, they were even up to misrepresenting their relationship to strangers as that of husband and wife, a subterfuge they surely then maintained whenever feasible during subsequent holidays together in faraway places.”
Dr. Maciejewski published an article about his find in a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Rundschau, in September. An English version will appear in American Imago next month. Freud helped found the quarterly, now published by Johns Hopkins University Press, in 1939, shortly before his death in London, where he lived after fleeing the Nazis. Minna Bernays died in London in 1941.
Jürg Wintsch, proprietor of the Schweizerhaus, confirmed the existence of the ledger entry, which he said Dr. Maciejewski had first brought to his attention. He described Room 11, now called 24, as one of the largest in the hotel and said its structure was substantially unchanged since Freud’s visit. He said he had been hoping to keep Freud’s stay there a secret until the hotel’s 125th anniversary next June.
The triangle of Freud, his wife and her sister has long been irresistible to scholars, including Dr. Gay, who noted in a 1989 essay, “As every biographer of Freud must ruefully acknowledge, that great unriddler of mysteries left behind some tantalizing private mysteries of his own.”
The most riveting among them, he wrote, were the rumors of a love affair with Miss Bernays. But, he added, scant evidence of any romance culd be found in the published correspondence between Freud and his sister-in-law, although some letters were intriguingly missing.
From the moment Freud fell in love with Martha Bernays in 1882, he was also drawn to her “intelligent, caustic” younger sister, Minna, whose fiancé died of tuberculosis in 1886, the year the Freuds married, Dr. Gay wrote in the essay. In 1896, Miss Bernays moved in with the Freuds, helping with household chores and child rearing. She lived with them, it turned out, for 42 years.
In 1953, Ernest Jones, Freud’s student and first biographer, tried vigorously to dispel stray gossip about Freud’s “second wife.” He dismissed what he called “strange legends” and described Freud as “monogamic in a very unusual degree.”
Mr. Jones wrote, “His wife was assuredly the only woman in Freud’s love life, and she always came first before all other mortals.”
This idyllic portrait largely held sway until 1969, when John M. Billinsky, a psychologist at the Andover Newton Theological School in Massachusetts, published an interview he conducted with Jung in Switzerland in 1957. Recounting a visit with his wife to Freud in Vienna in 1907, Jung told Dr. Billinsky that Freud had said, “I am sorry I can give you no real hospitality; I have nothing at home but an elderly wife.”
In contrast, Jung described Miss Bernays as “very good looking” although later photographs show her rather dour and stolid and said that in private she confessed that “she was very much bothered by her relationship with Freud and felt guilty about it.”
“From her I learned that Freud was in love with her and that their relationship was indeed very intimate,” Jung continued.
When Jung and Freud traveled to America in 1909, Jung said, Freud confided some dreams about Mrs. Freud and Miss Bernays, but then abruptly ended the discussion, saying, “I could tell you more, but I cannot risk my authority.”
Jung’s account was attacked as unreliable by, among others, Dr. Kurt R. Eissler, the longtime director of the Sigmund Freud Archives who, as recently as 1993, six years before his death at 90, wrote in a published essay, “In one respect Freud was undeniably superior to Jung: his sexual record was lily white.”
Dr. Eissler said that Freud’s theory “of course was obscene, with its eternal harping on sex, but the conduct of the man who originated it was beyond reproach.”
What Dr. Eissler did not say was that four years before the Billinsky interview, he had heard many of the same things about Freud and Miss Bernays firsthand in an interview with Jung in Zurich in 1953. But Dr. Eissler and the Freud Archives placed an embargo on the transcript of the interview for 50 years and then ordered the papers sealed for an additional 10 years, until 2013. A German transcript, stamped “Confidential,” in the Library of Congress was made available in 2003 for reading only at the library, although a copy was obtained by The New York Times.
In 1981, Dr. Eissler was at the center of an uproar at the Archives when his designated successor as director, Jeffrey M. Masson, was fired after breaking ranks with orthodox Freudians over interpretations of psychoanalytic theory and Freud’s character.
“Every man has his secrets,” Jung concluded, adding that when it came to Freud himself, “the unconscious was something which one should not touch.”
Jung theorized to Dr. Eissler that Freud had experienced some disappointment in love, sublimating it into a drive for power and developing a neurosis expressed in fear of losing control of his bladder.
“It could be precisely that he got into this conflict which in marriage is all too frequent, right?” Jung said. “The young woman, the other woman.”
Jung said that he vaguely recalled something about “a possible pregnancy,” but quickly added, “That can all be a stupid assumption.”
Hardly so to Mr. Swales. In a 1982 journal article, he argued that Freud’s story of a young man’s episode of forgetfulness in his 1901 book, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” was actually thinly disguised autobiography, exposing Freud’s own alarm over an inconvenient pregnancy.
Since then, Mr. Swales said, he has traced a 1900 trip by Freud and Miss Bernays to the Austrian town of Meran where she may have had an abortion, falling mysteriously ill after returning to Vienna.
Freud, in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, said that Miss Bernays was suffering from a lung ailment, but, Mr. Swales said, “The jury is still out.”
for it was called Putinka, after the Russian president. Putinka’s owners claim that Vladimir V. Putin himself holds no interest in the drink, that the name is the product of a public solicitation. This has not stopped anti-Kremlin protesters from carrying bottles of this vodka during marches, raising it high among the banners. But Putinka’s P.R. man was eager to dispel the rumored connection. “It’s not like you’re drinking Putin,” he politely explained. “You don’t want to drink Putin.” Ah, but to pretend. The Leader of All the Russiasas the czar used to be knownwent down hard, not smooth, as could be expected. The aftertaste was metallic, much like you would notice after having a gun barrel stuck in your maw. One of our group, Arkay, remarked that Ukraine and Georgia were already familiar with this taste. GRADE: C
is produced in Moscow’s famous state-controlled Cristall distillery (not to be confused with France’s Cristal champagne). The bottle is shaped like a pyramid, which, the company says, “accumulates special energy, which positively affects the spirit inside.” A stereogram sticker of a Kremlin tower, attached to the back of the clear glass vessel, loomed through the vodka bottle. Etalon’s makers claim that this two-dimensional image provides a useful treatment for nearsightedness, as a way to “relax tired eyes and strengthen eye muscles.” After several bouts with Putinka and Etalon, I could imagine a point in the evening where pyramids and holograms would provide the only help. Etalon vodka offered a rich, full flavor that didn’t stick around too long. Very smooth, so smooth as to demand several more pours down the same un-bumpy path. GRADE: A-
Capitalizing on the fact that this consortium of the world’s top seven economiesplus Russiahas no official name, the makers of this vodka were free to adopt the term G8 as their own. A perfectly sneaky deed, with a bottle to match. It looks like the kind of thing you would fill with bathtub vodka, the fabled samogon. Official-looking stamps cover the label, along with the words “By Order of the Foreign Ministry for the G8.” All bogus. This was the one bottle in our test that had no plastic filter jammed into the spout. These spouts (there’s something infuriatingly childproof about them) are awful, making for slow, messy pours and lots of vain bottle-shaking. Vika would find out, however, that if one were accidentally to knock over a bottle of G8, much of the G8 would end up on the carpet. This would be a shame, since G8 vodka, a highly drinkable idea, provided a pleasant, tasteful kick that shook us from Veda’s comfortable vapors. GRADE: B
from the glacial Lake Ladoga, outside St. Petersburg. The spirits undergo eight distillationsdouble the Russian standard for “luxury”then two charcoal filtrations, to remove impurities, and two quartz filtrations, to “energize” the vodka. That goes a long way toward mytologizing this product, which provides the gold standard for Russian vodka, with sales exceeding one million cases a year. By the time we got around to tasting it, the neighbors had come to complain about all of the shouting, and then had run off down the hall in some kind of terror. There was a blouse balled up in the corner. Arkady parceled out shots with abandon. It may have been in my head, but Imperia actually appeared to relieve my thirst. This was the danger zone, when vodka started going down like water. GRADE: A+
Why was there a shallow pool of vodka covering the entire glass tabletop? These questions and many others would go unanswered. It was time for Flagman, which has the distinction of being the “Official Purveyor to the Moscow Kremlin.” In his day, Stalin compelled his subordinates to work beside him late into the evening, lending them what’s known as a “Kremlin complexion.” Many more nights like this one, and we would also have pale skin, sunken eyes, and that particular stare of inner hunger. But duty called, Olga kept dancing, and Flagman, which means flagship, poured out in icy floes. A heck of a drink, good enough to penetrate this fog and leave a familiar impression of robust invincibility. GRADE: B+
