The NYT's piece's statement on vodka is a series of half-truths and exaggerations.

The tsarist state's control over the manufacture and distribution of alcohol is a well-known fact, but Christian implies this was a consistent and homogenous process, which it was not. An entity enforcing an overarching monopoly on vodka only came into existence in 1894, vodka sales prior to that time were part of a hodgepodge of licenses and tax farming.

To characterize tsarist Russia as a superpower is very misleading and one of the biggest problems of Christian's approach. It is accurate to say that the imperial state relied upon vodka for the bulk of its revenues. Taken alone though, this facet of Russian finance generates more heat then light. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Russian state ran chronic deficits. To pay for the military (Russia's largest expenditure throughout this period) necessitated a degree of starving other state entities of funds. The imperial bureaucracy lacked any real systematic budgets to implement any wider expansion of taxes. More important than vodka revenues were foreign capital and loans, which increased tenfold between 1880 and 1905. The preeminence of vodka as a source of domestic (an important qualifier) revenue was more of a symptom of the shortcomings of the tsarist state, not its cause.

Christian's emphasis upon the negative connotations of the vodka monopoly are of a piece of contemporaneous political critics of the Imperial Russia. The vodka monopoly, in all its forms, increasingly became an albatross around the state's neck. For example, one popular theory about Russia's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War was that they state encouraged alcoholism among its soldiers in the name of revenue. Furthermore, critiques of Russian drunkenness was a relatively safe way to critique the imperial state. After all, the tsar was the guarantor of Russian Orthodoxy and sobriety was a sign of a moral order. Ironically, the state's attempts to deflect these charges led to its closing down taverns that served only alcohol when it instituted the state monopoly. This only served to increase private consumption of alcohol. This discourse about the social destructiveness of alcohol was also the public justification behind both the Duma and the tsar's support of temperance during the First World War. While this led to a loss of revenue, it also marked a shift away from indirect tax policy and a more rational tax system. But the chronic administrative chaos, coupled with wartime pressures (and the loss of a huge tax base in the Western provinces), rendered these reforms moot. The temperance edicts also had the effect of encouraging illicit alcohol production to meet demand. This hooch put a further squeeze upon the Russian food supply. But again, it is important not to make too much of this as this was only one dimension of the Russian black market.

While Christian is a reputable scholar, his focus upon "Big History" can be problematic, as seen in this case. One of the problems with focusing too much upon the big picture is that certain important factors in history get confused and concepts and chronology get conflated together. Russia was many things in the nineteenth century, but a superpower was not one of them. The term superpower only really applies to the Soviet Union after 1945 which enjoyed a degree of power, military preeminence, international clout, and political hegemony that far eclipsed that of the Romanovs. The reliance on vodka was a symptom of Russia's anemic state apparatus and patchwork economic development, not a catalyst of it

Sources

Herlihy, Patricia. The Alcoholic Empire Vodka & Politics in Late Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Strachan, Hew. Financing the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Weeks, Theodore R. Across the Revolutionary Divide: Russia and the USSR, 1861-1945. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.