Beating the System

Beating the System (or how I learnt to stop worrying and love moonshine)

It is, of course, something of a cliché for an expat to say he misses British (ie English) pubs and pub life. But I’m afraid the temptation is too great.

So here goes.

One of the things I miss most about living in Sweden is a genuine pub culture.

Before you get your handkerchiefs out, I should add that I’d had plenty of time to get used to this self-imposed hole in my life. Even before I came here, I’d lived abroad for about a dozen years.

Italy at least had bars and there was no shortage of alcohol. It was just that Italian life revolved round the dining table, and this was where most of the drink was dispensed. You can see their point. If Britain had anything like the traditions of Italian cuisine, Brits might never have needed to seek the consolations of the tavern.

Egypt was another question entirely. As you may have noticed, the inhabitants are predominantly Muslim. And even if they aren’t as zealous as some of their co-religionists in the Gulf, they hardly encouraged the abuse of a substance they had the privilege of first naming. Alcohol, that is. From al (the) kohl (oriental eyeshadow). I have no idea what the connection is between distilling and make-up. But who cares? It just seems sweetly ironic that the people that invented distilling for the purposes of pleasure are amongst the fiercest in denying us that pleasure.

Still, I can’t complain too much. The Christian Copts had, as a result of the Muslim ban, a monopoly on the production and sale of booze, and there were plenty of outlets around if you knew where to look. My own favourite tipple was a grape-based drink called zibib. It resembled, in taste and appearance, ouzo. And I can testify to its quality. For, despite the loss of countless brain cells, I still have my eyesight. Well, OK. It could be better. But it was a small price to pay. Zibib kept me sane in a place full of crazies.

Next was Russia. A massive upturn in the gentle dipsomaniac’s fortunes, you might think. The land of vodka and oblivion. Well, think again. I landed up there in the late 80s, just before the CCCP disintegrated. And bumbling, lovely Gorby had just decided the solution to all the economic and social problems of the country was – not, as you might guess, for the Communist Party to self-destruct – but rather to introduce a Soviet form of Prohibition. The legislation went by the familiar name of sukhoi zakon, or dry law, and fortunately fell short of the rigour of the American version. But ancient vineyards (in Georgia) were torn down, the price of hard liquor was substantially raised and production and outlets severely restricted.

Needless to say, the whole enterprise backfired. People now had to take time off work to queue to buy booze, government excise revenues plummeted and, as in the US, the black market thrived, spawning the generation of kleptocrats that now pass for businessmen in Russia. There’s also a case to be made for the contribution of the dry laws to the disintegration of the Soviet system.

In order for me to remain wide-eyed and legless, I was obliged to spend my remaining gulag-term in Soviet Armenia. The Armenians, bless them, had never succumbed to the attractions of serious inebriation. They enjoyed the occasional glass of wine, which had completely disappeared from any outlet outside of Georgia, leaving the field wide-open for those that appreciated more rarefied products. Like vodka. And like myself.

When I first turned up in Sweden, I had little idea of what to expect, other than an improvement on the Soviet dry laws. What the country was most famous for was its liberal attitude towards sex and its ‘invention’ of Absolute vodka. Both were encouraging features for an aspiring libertine. But both proved to be chimeras. The Swedes may have been more open-minded than your average Iranian mullah, but this did not translate into queues of houris lined up outside the door of my bedsit.

As for the availability of alcohol, fuggedaboudit. The Swedish idea of an off-licence is state-monopoly outlets that are restricted in numbers and opening hours. Finland has something similar, but at least offered the consolation of labelling the shops ‘Alko’. True, the sensitive soul might feel discouraged by being compelled to buy his booze from a shop that stigmatised his drinking habits. But at least you would have no problem finding where to buy your booze.

In Sweden these outlets go by the name of ‘Systembolaget’, which makes them sound like insurance companies, or perhaps plumbing concerns. Colloquially this institution is known as ‘Systemet’ or the System, and if that sounds a little like the title of a Franz Kafka novel, then you haven’t seen anything yet (see below under ‘Rationing). Since in the 90s their shelves were bare, and even a bottle of lower alcohol beer had to be ordered over the counter from assistants that looked as though they’d been imported from the Soviet gulags, it took skill to locate them and courage to utilise them.

A similar principle applied to licensed premises. The easiest way to identify them was to look for the queues at seven o’clock on Friday evenings. You have to be a hardened drinker to wait in temperatures of up (or is it down?) to -15°C to get your weekend tipple. As for having a convivial conversation in the process, then you can forget about that too. It’s wholly understandable, given the circumstances, that a bit of a chat did not figure high on the list of priorities. By the time you got in, you would look at the clock, calculate how much you could reasonably drink before closing, then buy the calculated drinks (usually beer, unless you’d made a killing on the stock exchange), line them up in front of you and systematically work your way along the rank and file.

It was enough to make you nostalgic for the good old USS of R. There, at least, if you could get hold of booze, it was dirt cheap. Even after Gorby’s efforts to raise the excise taxes, a dollar bought a lot of roubles. And if you couldn’t get hold of rouble booze, there were always the hard currency stores. In Sweden the only relief from the constant struggle to achieve alchemical oblivion was to take a boat trip to Denmark where they have a more life-enhancing attitude to most of the vices. Or a ferry to nowhere in particular as long as it took you into foreign waters.

In the process, you could always indulge in a bit of smuggling, exceed your duty-free allowance to such an extent it would justify getting caught, and thus reduce the necessity to take such trips on a daily basis. Or you could practise the time-honoured tradition of producing or buying the home-made variety. Needless to say, this was also quite illegal. But the custom was so widespread that the law was near impossible to enforce. Add to that the fact that it was quite possible to buy the apparatus need from any decent hardware store. Or home-brew shop, for that matter. Where along with the (licit) kits for making beer, you could also purchase all the flavourings you would need in order to make your hooch taste like a distant and long-lost cousin of the more conventional spirits. The reason for stills being a legal commodity, when home-distilled products were not, is that the former could also be used for making car-battery water.

Time for an exclamation mark, I think!

Frankly, I would not be caught dead, if that’s the right expression, drinking any booze that I had manufactured myself. On the other hand, having putative in-laws that were more proficient in the black arts made for a perfectly good reason to get married with a local. Thus were both my blushing bride and myself able to corrode our respective livers through this dark period of Swedish history.

All of this useful knowledge and experience lay in the future, however. The nadir of my dipsomaniac desperation was plumbed with my first New Year in the country. One of my students had invited me to spend New Year with some pals of his at a ski resort in Värmland, some 300 miles north of Gothenburg. I had a couple of Scottish friends staying with me at the time, but that was no problem. The Swedes would set off in their Saab and I in my rust-bucket of a Ford Capri and we would travel in convoy up to our destination.

There was only one problem. The Swedish pal that had been deputed to buy the alcohol well in advance had failed to do so. For which may he suffer the death of the thousand raps across the knuckles. So we stopped about a quarter of the way there at the last Systembolaget that was likely to be open on the way on the last day any of them was going to be open before New Year’s Eve. The problem was that there was a football-sized crowd extending into the car park that had had the same idea for the same reason. Swedes are amongst the most practical and sensible people I have come across. So really and truly the huddled masses should have known better. It wasn’t long before our delegation returned holding a queue ticket with the number fifteen hundred and fifty godzillion on it and claiming that we would have to give up the quest if we were going to arrive at the resort before we had to return.

It was the driest New Year I have experienced since I arrived at the legal drinking age. We tried our best. I thought I had hit on the perfect plan. It seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, I was in the company of a couple of Scots. We decided to invoke the spirit of first-footing Hogmanaying and introduce it to Sweden. So as it approached midnight on the Eve, we three toured the other chalets in the resort looking to cross alien thresholds with a lump of blackened snow (that is, coal substitute), an engaging collective smile and an explanation of this endearing Scottish custom in return for the customary liquid remuneration. This was about as successful as Gorby’s drinking laws. It was then that I decided that Swedes intellectually an incurious lot.

 As if all that were not depressing enough, my first and only attempt at downhill skiing resulted in ritual humiliation at the hands (knees and bumpsadaisy) of more proficient three-year-old downhillers and an ankle so swollen that it no longer fit my ski boot.

Even the Ford Capri got in on the act. I needed a jump start to get Gracie going, the skill of a rally driver to keep her snowtyre-free carcase on the icy road and a tow from aforementioned Swedish friends when her drive belt snapped in the middle of a traffic-light intersection still about 80 miles north of Gothenburg.

Honestly, it was all enough to drive you to drink.

But by now, you will have got my point. Even if the licensing laws have been somewhat eased since then, Sweden is still has not achieved most-favoured nation status in the binge-holiday index.

The more inquisitive of you might well be wondering by now how could it come to this pass. How could it be that a people that lived part of the year at least in such a harsh climate were deprived of the consolations of booze-induced oblivion?

The story is a long and sad, my children, so gather round and do not expect any uplifting moral to sugar the pill. The once-upon-a-time is even worse, and the moral involved is strictly down-lifting.

From the 16th century on, hard liquor has been the main focus of government attempts to restrict alcohol consumption. All other intoxicating beverages have been the subject of collateral damage, so that today the only such drinks that you can buy in ordinary supermarkets are so low in alcohol that you are more likely to cause damage to your bladder than your liver.

The earliest restrictions ranged from introducing and increasing taxation on the production and consumption of spirits, through demanding that alcohol be only served in appropriately licensed premises, all the way to outright bans on distilling. Most of these efforts were directed at domestic production – meaning in this case, producing booze in your back room, either so you could get blasted on your own or invite over local friends and acquaintances with a view to selling your product as they drank it in your front parlour. But the trade and habit were hard to kill.

You can judge for yourself the extent of this business. When a general amnesty was declared in the 1700s on condition that you handed in your distilling equipment to the authorities, over 150, 000 stills were surrendered – this in a population at the time of under 3 million. What is even more staggering is that the amnesty was deemed a failure, since there was no perceptible reduction in the amount of hooch made or drunk.

So home-distilling continued, legally or illegally into the 19th century. In the meantime, a blow was delivered to the Swedish equivalent of the village pub, from which it has never recovered. The irony is that this was simply a knock-on effect of a measure that had wholly other aims. This consisted of a series of acts, collectively known as the Storskiftet or Great Partition, which took place over a century. The aim was to concentrate rural holdings into larger parcels of land. Hitherto, smallholders had owned and worked different unconnected strips of land, separated by other strips belonging (logically enough) to others. As you might guess, this redistribution worked to the benefit of some rather than others, since some parcels of land were of much better quality than others.

As far as present purposes are concerned, however, it meant that villages were broken up and populations dispersed, so that few small towns in Sweden these days have a recognisable and traditional hub. And no hub, no pub. The churches were still a focal point, of course, but equally of course, this wasn’t quite the same thing.

The real crunch came, however, during the 19th century as the Swedish Temperance organisations gained more and more support and influence and put the final spoke in the wheel of home-distilling. As the movement gained momentum, clubs were set up all over the country with names like the Good Templar Order. Who knows what the Templars had to do with it. They have never struck me as being particularly abstemious. Whatever…. More importantly, such organisations exercised an increasing influence over the more democratic parties that were emerging around this time, notably the Social Democrats.

By the second decade of the 20th century, teetotallers were impressively represented in the Swedish Parliament. Indeed according to some accounts, they formed a cross-party majority. So it came to pass that, after years of trying, the temperance lobby managed in 1922 to get approval for a referendum that, if passed, would have introduced a total prohibition of alcohol in the country. It’ll come as no surprise that this proposal came in the wake of the Volstead Act in the USA.

Thanks at least partly to Albert Engström’s poster above, the anti-prohibitionists narrowly won the vote. Whatever your drinking habits, you have to admit his slogan is catchier. ‘Crayfish demand these drinks!’ The temperance poster below says ‘Payday – Vote Yes’ under the drunken guy on the steps, which has the virtue of simplicity and little else.

You might have thought this would be the end of the business. But, given the state of play when I arrived, clearly it wasn’t. Still, it could have been worse.

Regardless of the referendum, rationing of alcohol had been introduced during the First World War. This entailed the setting up of Systembolaget, the state monopoly, and the issuing of ration books – ‘motboken’.

After the referendum, the Temperance groups went into decline, but rationing continued until 1955, even if Sweden never actually went to war during that time (nor any other time since the early 19th century). Additionally, the Swedish government instituted an obligatory food requirement, meaning that you could only order a drink if you ordered a meal alongside. No doubt this would have been a boom time for the Swedish catering trade, if such outlets had not also been radically curtailed. In many places, you could therefore get a drink only at the state-owned railway hotels, a restriction that continued in slightly modified form through to the 90s.

I don’t know if that was where Gorbachev drew his inspiration, but I vividly remember being subjected to the same rule when I visited Soviet Lithuania. There I visited a bar with a friend. When I ordered a beer, I was told that I would have to have something to eat with it. And, this being the Soviet Union, there was only one thing on the menu. That turned out to be pig’s ear. I have only eaten pig’s ear twice in my life. Both times in an otherwise charming pub in Vilnius.

Back to the point, since I’m sure you’re eager to know how much hard liquor you were allowed to put away each month. The answer is anything from 1 (in the beginning) to 3 litres (somewhat later). In the meantime, bizarrely enough, you apparently need a doctor’s prescription in order to buy strong beer from the State shops!

This raises the interesting question of what the doctor reckoned might be cured by regular and regulated ingestion of strong beer. Excessive happiness, perhaps. Chronic anorexia? An attempt to stave off DTs by gradual withdrawal? A homeopathic attempt to cure cirrhosis of the liver? Or a reward, equivalent to a lump of sugar with children, for not screaming at the prospect of an injection? Your guess will inevitably be better than mine.

All that may sound unexpectedly liberal, if more than a trifle absurd. But it’s worth pointing out that not everyone was entitled to a ration book – only fine upstanding (and usually male) members of the community. Even if you were a man, things were not altogether straightforward. You had to have a job and a home to qualify for a book. And you almost certainly needed a wife (who would almost equally certainly not have qualified for one). The degree of social control this involved is mind-blowing. All the checks were carried out and enforced by Systembolaget.

As a result, the police were frequent visitors to Systemet’s Central Registry where all the records were kept in order to find out information about individual consumers. What exactly they were checking on is, again, up for grabs. Most obviously, it would be to ensure that no single, homeless and unemployed women were blackmailing staff into slipping them a half bottle of schnapps in a brown paper bag. More positively, the ration book could be used as an alibi, since it noted the date and time of purchases. As in ‘I couldn’t possibly have murdered the old bastard, your honour, since I was buying a bottle of rum at the time’.

Wikipedia’s website on the subject names the following areas of interest for the police:

Information about:

  • social assistance ( whatever that means);
  • periods of incarceration in prison (as in incarce-ration book);
  • periods of admission for treatment as an alcoholic;
  • arrest record for drunk and disorderly offences (I mean, wouldn’t the police have their own records, or were they just being lazy?);
  • tax evasion (?? – godwot);
  • failure to pay child benefit (?!);
  • alcohol-related crime (see fourth bullet point above).

The only things missing really are membership of the Communist Party and buggering the Pope.

Well, of course, those were the bad old days. Now we are all much more civilised. Systemet is today open on Saturday mornings and has a broad selection of exciting alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks from around the world. They are also self-service, thus significantly enhancing your chances of slipping one under your fur-lined winter jacket and walking out with it. Meanwhile, the sales assistants are no longer fugitives from Nazi death camps. Indeed they are considerably better-informed about what they sell than your average corner-shop offy proprietor, and have been known to smile close to knocking-off time. What’s more, the System’s state-owned supplier is reputed to be the largest single purchaser of alcohol in the world and their catalogue must offer one of the broadest selections available just about anywhere. Just to take one example, the selection of rum extends to 603 different brands from, I estimate, 42 different nations, including countries you never connected with the product. Like Fiji. All of which you can order, though preferably not at the same time.

Problem is, though, the booze is still pricy. So day trips to Denmark are still on the menu, and facilitated by the building of a bridge over the straits that separate the two countries. Even more of an attraction, since Sweden joined the EU, is Germany, where alcohol is so cheap that you can afford to buy your weekly, monthly or yearly ration, even if you are homeless, unemployed or even unmarried.

Well, it’s all relative, I suppose.

Even if you live too far away from these neighbouring countries to make regular outings feasible, you can always console yourself with the fact that there is always someone worse off.

The biggest Systembolaget in the country, and by extension the one that is in a class of its own when it comes to sales, is to be found in Strömstad. ‘And what is so special about Strömstad?’ you will be asking yourselves. Answer: It is the closest Swedish town of any size to Oslo and the more populous south of Norway.

Yes, you’ve guessed it. The grass is always greener on the other side – liquor costs nearly twice as much over the Norwegian border. And it goes without saying that the only place you can buy it is at a state-monopoly shop.

To which we can only say, ‘Skål’.

Usual thanks to wiki.commons for the pix.

And wikipedia and Systembolaget for most of the rest.