I have not read Mark Forsyth's book yet, but I believe he is being facetious and light-hearted?

A danger of history is to treat events as mono-causal, which often ignores the multitude of causes and effects that causes history to unfold the way it does.

There is some truth in this. Vodka actually generated nearly one third of the tax revenues of the Russian Empire at that time. The ban severely curtailed the revenues of this lucrative business and further stretched the Russian economy. But after the ban people actually begin to resort to other drugs to dull their senses. Cocaine and illegal home-brews for example widely surged in popularity after the ban on vodka. But we can safely conclude that the ban on vodka further deepened the resentments people had against the government.

This is only a long line in a series of rising tensions the Russian people had against the Czars. The revolutions of 1905 had been brutally suppressed, most infamously in the Bloody Sunday incident where peaceful demonstrators were short down by the Czar's guards. Many of the victims were, a more moderate form of socialists that called for reform rather than violent revolution, which showed very much of the reluctance to change the autocratic nature of the Empire.

World War 1 greatly exacerbated the food shortages and deep-rooted problems the Russian empire was facing. Farmers were conscripted and sent to the front lines, food was requisitioned and sent to support the armies. People were starving in the streets. Their western borderlands were being devastated by the war with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many Russian soldiers were getting killed and captured as the Russians lost engagement after engagement with the Germans (although the Imperial Russian army was substantially more successful against the Austro-Hungarian army). Suffice to say the war was DEEPLY unpopular with the people and more and more turned to the revolutionaries promising to end the war.

Russia still remained in quite a feudal state despite its process of industrialisation. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1861 gave serfs many more legal rights but economically the landowners and boyars still controlled much, and the lower classes still felt largely disenfranchised.

All this time revolutionary sentiment had been brewing in the Russian Empire. Socialist ideas were popular amongst the urban working class, and increasing calls for democratic elections and socialist transformation were pervasive everywhere. Rumours of the infamous Rasputin entangling himself with Tsarina Alexandra continued to foment dissent.

Lenin and other revolutionaries had actually been receiving clandestine help from the Imperial German High command, because they knew he could foment dissent from within the Empire and hopefully end the war on the Eastern front. He had been exiled to Switzerland prior, and this time they assisted in smuggling him into back into Petrograd to further stir up anti-war sentiment. He was successful in doing this. Things finally came to a head in the February Revolution, and subsequently the October Revolution.

P.S. Because my readings always glossed over the importance of vodka in favour of the sociopolitical factors in causing the Revolution, suffice to say, I would love for someone more well-versed than me in the history of inebriation to chip in. Vodka after all was an important part of ordinary Russians' lives. The image of a bunch of drunk Russians getting sober and realising how miserable they were and then taking up arms against the government is simply too amusing to pass up.

Forsyth is roughly correct that the ban on alcohol, not just vodka, was a factor in the political tensions that erupted in 1917. As with many popular histories of this type, A Short History of Drunkenness oversells its assertions.

Nicholas II's decrees limiting the sale of alcohol in 1914 did not emerge out of the ether. Temperance had enjoyed a degree of political support among Russian liberals and other would-be reformers within the empire. Those who championed economic development as a way to modernize the empire saw chronic drunkenness as an impediment to efficiency. Some liberals and social democrats in the post-1905 Duma believed the state monopoly on alcohol was a nefarious tool of autocracy to deaden the spirits of the masses with cheap alcohol and prevent the state from relying upon the Duma for revenue. Religious conservatives also decried the baleful impact of alcohol on public morals and this dovetailed with emerging concerns about Russia's growing cities and urban proletariat. There were a number of commentators who pegged alcoholism as one of the causes for Russia's defeat in the war with Japan.

This gave temperance some weight in 1914, but there were also immediate factors pushing the state to adapt this policy. Much like other combatants, the state recognized that the process of making alcohol was an inefficient use of food. Loaves of bread were more valuable for a wartime economy than bottles of vodka. Russian temperance in this regard was not that dissimilar to US temperance in which wartime needs intertwined with prewar discourses on the social costs of drink. This poster produced by the United Committee on War Temperance in NYC conveys much the same ideals as Russian wartime temperance; food used on alcohol is wasted and drunkenness limits the war effort.

There were unanticipated ramifications for Nicholas II's temperance edicts. Not only did it lead to a loss of revenue (which can be overstated, the loss of the Western Provinces as a source of revenue of all kinds arguably had a greater impact as did the closing of the Dardanelles for Russian grain exports) , but it also gave the peasantry an incentive to make moonshine. The state monopoly had rendered moonshine largely unnecessary prior to 1914 as hard liquor was widely available and cheap. But temperance created a market void which the peasantry filled. Moonshine also proved to be a valuable source of income as the rural economy collapsed under wartime strain. The Duma floated various programs for nationalization or expropriation of grain in light of the loss of the Western Provinces. Moonshine was easier to hide and much more profitable than a patriotic growing of wheat and potatoes. This exacerbated the acute food supply in the region around Petrograd as bread prices escalated.

Temperance did underscore some of the inequities that permeated Russian society in 1917. One of the slogans chanted by the crowds in 1917 was the tsar drinks wine while we have water. But the alcohol ban did not create these sociopolitical situation. Pre-1917 Russia was a society that had numerous fracture lines and was coupled with a political order that in the words of Stephen Kotkin, choked on the very modernity it tried to create to stay a great power.

1917 would have occurred even if there was no alcohol ban. The ban exacerbated tensions, but these would have existed anyway. The rural economy would have been under great stress given the loss of exports and the monopolization of transport networks by the state. State revenues had already taken a major hit because of the war and nearly every major power took steps to limit alcohol production because of the war. The Duma and the tsar's push for temperance was part of a larger drive by the empire's political elite to exert social control over the peasantry. At best, temperance was a contributing factor to the Russian Revolution, not a root cause.

Sources

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

Holquist, Peter. Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.