By now, you may have at least seen a headline or two about the dismissal of Maj. Gen. Michael Carey—the man responsible for America’s intercontinental nuclear arsenal—for “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” Perhaps you read the New York Daily News’s juicy coverage of his “epic drunken bender in Moscow,” including swaying through Red Square, cavorting with “somewhat suspect women” into the late hours and awkward attempts to fist-bump tour guides at Russia’s holiest monastery. Even Gawker chimed in with the headline: “Air Force General Fired for Awesomest Overseas Drunken Bender Ever.” While the declassified investigation offers plenty of salacious details about the Carey scandal (and reinforces popular stereotypes about Russia as a place of unbridled drunken excess) there is little in it that should be surprising to anyone familiar with Russian customs, politics and history.
According to the report, in July 2013, Major General Carey travelled to Moscow as part of a bilateral working group on safeguarding nuclear convoys, personnel training and transportation security—which he dismissed as a “waste of time.” Carey’s initial frustrations were certainly compounded by travel delays and jet lag, but things didn’t go off the rails until he came toe to toe with a series of official Russian banquets.
Here, a brief digression is in order: Russia is famous for its hospitality. A main feature of that traditional hospitality has long been the banquet feast—a social event where temperament and trustworthiness are assessed, and where new acquaintances can become fast friends. Such banquets contain their own rituals: most notably the volleying of round upon round of loquacious toasts between the hosts and their guests—toasts to individual honorees and their families, to leaders, to the deceased, toasts for peace, understanding, cooperation and so forth—which require the assembled guests to down their alcohol (usually vodka) or risk offending their hosts. Foreigners unaccustomed to these rituals risk a minor faux pas, while those unprepared to consume large quantities of potent distilled spirits often risk even more. When it comes to diplomacy, the banquet can be a professional hazard—one confronted by generations of foreign dignitaries well before Major General Carey.
The official investigation into the Carey affair gives some insight into just where things went wrong. On the afternoon of July 16, the Russian delegation treated their American counterparts to a sumptuous, multi-course lunch banquet that included nine rounds of vodka toasts. Another, “more formal and ornate” banquet the following day included at least 25 rounds of vodka toasts. Apparently the major general did not handle them well. “You know, you did the traditional drinks and if you moderate yourself, you were good to go. But the general, it looked like it hit him pretty hard,” said one witness quoted in the report, recalling, “he did look like he had quite a few.” When it was Carey’s turn to raise his glass at the first dinner, he not only inarticulately praised the “lovely ladies” of Russia, but also raised the thorniest of contemporary issues in East-West diplomacy—Syria and Edward Snowden—“which were not well received” by the Russian hosts.
When interviewed, members of the American delegation were asked whether the Russians pressured them to drink. One definitively answered: “No, it was not being pushed at all, and the Russian side did not imbibe heavily… they were sipping their shot glasses.” Another explained, “one could even put a hand over the shot glass and the servers would not refill it with vodka, and nothing was said.” Even the head of the Russian delegation was reportedly toasting with water, claiming “I’m in charge so I need to be sober today.”
Yet when asked whether he felt pressure to drink, Carey replied, “absolutely. I mean that’s, that’s the deal when you go to a Russian toasting event you’re into the toasts.” Carey admitted that he’d had about a half-dozen shots on some toasts, and finished his glass on others, before declining to answer whether he was intoxicated upon leaving the banquet to continue his escapades in Moscow.
Still, with apologies to Gawker and the New York Post, this was hardly the most epic Russian bender by a public official ever. In historical perspective, it was downright tame. In the process of researching my new book Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State, I’ve come across dozens of accounts of drunken state banquets spanning Russia’s imperial, Soviet and post-independence past—both by Russians accustomed to such traditions, and foreigners shocked and appalled by them.