Today, the enemy is clear: he wrote dangerous books like “Crime and Punishment”, he has a gloomy appearance and is usually seen on a roller coaster, with his long beard flying in the wind, a plate of stroganoff in his lap and the Urban Legion on the phone.
In the meme war, we play Russian roulette with culture. Nobody gets out alive. Vodka, an ancestral spirit, became a beverage non grata. Unless you’re baptized—or rebaptized.
The invasion of Ukraine provided heavy ammunition for the era of cancellations. Adhering to sanctions of all kinds, bars in the US throw away the bottles of the drink of the tsars and muzhiks and, in an indignant alcoholic housecleaning, change names and cocktail recipes.
It was even left for the simple moscow mule. Keeping Putin’s base name on the cocktail party would, after all, be tantamount to having an AK-12 in your hands. The solution was to switch to kiev mule, celebrating resistance in the ukrainian capital.
Even if the tasty alliteration of “mm” is lost, ideological marketing has its fun, not least because it’s very bad to drink with the feeling of being on the wrong side of history — the hangover can be Siberian.
It is not the first time that vodka, whose paternity, by the way, is also disputed by Poland, has been cancelled. In 1983, it was the most consumed spirit in the US, putting gin and whiskey to shame.
Drinking Stolichnaya on ice was a refined thing, a slight transgression in the Cold War. But then a Soviet missile shot down a civilian plane, killing more than 200 people. The sale of Russian vodka fell along with the boeing that, in an unfortunate navigation error, had invaded the USSR’s airspace.
It was the cue for Absolut, from neutral Sweden, to take over the post of chic and —most importantly—non-communist vodka. Andy Warhol and Keith Harring were asked to design special labels for the country’s brand. Ironically, Sweden is one of the biggest arms manufacturers on the planet.
Coincidentally, vodka became known worldwide in Ukraine. It was in 1945, at the Yalta Conference, a city in Crimea, controlled for less than a decade by the Russians.
On that occasion, Stalin twisted his mustache into the dry martini offered by Roosevelt and proudly downed the potion of his homeland, consumed as an elixir of courage by the soldiers who crossed the devastated Ukrainian soil to take Berlin. Along with Churchill, the three heads of state discussed the terms of the end of the Second World War. The vodka took on the colors of a dove with a branch in its beak.
Not by chance, the moscow mule was born a year later, from the minds of two businessmen who had nothing to do with communists, much less Russians. In a brainstorm that combined the useful with the pleasant, they decided to combine the Smirnoff manufactured and distributed by one of them, the American John G. Martin, and the ginger beer imported and stranded at the bar of the other, the Englishman Jack Morgan.
In geopolitical language, the story gets even more fun when you know that the bar in question, the Cock’n Bull, is at the center of the planet’s cultural imperialism: Hollywood. In other words, it is unlikely that Putin took a moscow mule in his entire life as a judo fighter, KGB agent and autocrat. He must not even know what it is. The toxic male tag would not allow for such a slip.
As for Biden and his predecessors, we can’t get our hands on fire, as the moscow mule is a beloved child of capitalist enterprise. In the 1960s, Smirnoff spent tubes of dollars to run campaigns featuring Woody Allen and other movie stars wielding the famous copper mug.
The mug, by the way, was produced by Morgan’s girlfriend’s company. Everything at home. And far from Kiev, Odessa and Moscow, where the giant cocktail shaker of history prepares a cocktail of misfortunes.
In Ukraine, in addition to (Russian) Molotov, what is produced is vodka dissidence, called gorilka there. Herbs, fruits, grains and other elements are added to the clear liquid, perhaps to dilute the Russian character, in soup-like combinations.
It remains to suggest banning caipiroska, an attack on the good old caipirinha.
I am currently a news writer for News Bulletin247 where I mostly cover sports news. I have always been interested in writing and it is something I am very passionate about. In my spare time, I enjoy reading and spending time with my family and friends.
