She's in the Kitchen, and She's Not Making Blinis Lena, right, looks like the kind of woman who could get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. But she sells up to 400 half-liter bottles of hooch every month, leaving her little time to keep house. http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/072500russia-bootlegger.html Russians don't call it hooch, of course. They call it samogon, a piece of slang that literally translates as "run by myself," which is just how the business is run. One reason may be that flouting the samogon law is an entrenched habit. [..] the samogon craft gained in the mid-1980's, during Mikhail S. Gorbachev's furious anti-alcohol campaign. Soviet authorities closed thousands of liquor stores and razed distilleries, breweries and vineyards, leaving truly dedicated drinkers scrambling for alternatives. People drank cologne and even brake fluid in search of refreshment. Air force pilots took to drinking the exceptionally pure alcohol used as a de-icer in MIG-25 jets, Mr. White noted, a practice so popular that the MIG-25 acquired the nickname "the flying restaurant." Some covered up their tippling by replacing the de-icer alcohol with water. This worked until their jets iced up in flight. Samogon, however, became the overwhelming choice of drink. Soviet militia made great shows of wrecking stills and hauling away boot- leggers. But it eventually became clear that wiping out samogon would mean locking up much of the nation, including party officials and members of the All-Union Voluntary Society for the Struggle for Sobriety, the government's anti-booze organ. Indeed, the industrial-size packages of yeast Lena regularly buys contain instructions for making samogon, under the discreet heading "A recipe for Russia's traditional national beverage." Lena's inspiration was across the courtyard, where bootleggers were buying pure alcohol, diluting it with water and selling it as vodka for 80 cents a bottle. "But it was weak stuff, only 30 proof, and the quality was bad," she said. "Sometimes they'd add sleeping pills, so it would knock you out quicker." She figured she could do better. So she bought a small still -- a pot, roughly wastebasket-sized, with a curlicued pipe sprouting from the top -- and began making real samogon. Today an ordinary bottle sells for 80 cents, a bottle spiced up with a skin-peeling combination of herbs and orange peel, among other things, costs 90 cents.
