Moscow Letter: It has arrived a little a late, but 15 years after the end of communism, Moscow has finally opened a vodka museum to give its citizens a very different view of history - one seen through the bottom of a glass.
Great leaders are here ranked not according to mundane things like empires built or battles lost, but on how they treated the demon drink. Ivan the Terrible, for instance, was, in fact, not so terrible: he was the first man to open pubs in Russia, because he realised he could tax them.
Peter the Great lived up to his reformist image by allowing women into pubs for the first time, and while Catherine the Great's lover, Potemkin, was out building all those villages, she was at home trying to make the demon drink more palatable.
At the time, vodka was made by distilling whatever vegetable or seed matter could be found, with uncertain results.
"Vodka at that time was of dreadful quality with a dreadful smell," says Daria, the museum's cheerful young guide. Catherine introduced different-flavoured vodkas, starting distillers on the long road that has brought us to alco-pops.
For a nation with the highest per capita spirit consumption in the world, it is surprising how little Russians know about vodka's origins. Nobody knows who first invented what started out as peasant moonshine, nor when, nor why it was called vodka. The best theory is that the name is a corruption of voda, or water, meaning "little water". Someone's attempt at ironic humour, presumably.
Meanwhile, Russians began wrestling with the problems of over-consumption. At least one battle, Drinking River near the city of Novgorod, was lost after the Russian army overprepared for combat by getting stonked, then marching into the river to drown.
Little wonder that in the second World War, military order 22 forbade all but frontline units from having a tipple - and then, presumably, only when they had the night off.
Things are different these days: A booming economy has produced dozens of brands from super-luxurious down to stuff better used as anti-freeze. It is a common sight to see, outside a roadside kiosk with perhaps 20 brands of vodka, a man of uncertain balance counting out his rubles, wondering how far up the quality range he can afford to go and still get the bus home.
In these summer months, the park benches of downtown Moscow are awash with drink bottles and sleeping drunks.
Buy a Russian a drink though and he'll tell you it's all in a good cause - Russians say when you drink vodka you are getting back in touch with your soul.
Of more modern leaders, the museum gives Lenin a ticking-off for closing the distilleries, while Stalin earns a star - red - for re-opening them.
Mikhail Gorbachev's slide into unpopularity began when he closed the distilleries, the downside of his famous glasnost policy, a move that did more than anything to convince everyone that communism had to go. Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically elected president, pushed the pendulum back, but rather too far.
His own drunkenness became a metaphor for the chaos of the 1990s when TV pictures were screened showing his official aircraft at Shannon airport, with dignitaries waiting by the red carpet while he slept off a heavy session inside. This image, screened again and again back home, is remembered to this day. "We remember Yeltsin, how dreadful it was that people around the world discovered how the president drinks," says Daria.
Which brings us to Vladimir Putin. Forget arguments about human rights, corruption or gas prices. Ordinary Russians like him because he is sober - if a little sour-faced. Mr Putin certainly rules with an iron hand but at least that hand is steady.
"Now things are different," says Daria brightly. "Mr Putin is healthy."
Her tip, by the way, for the finest vodka of all is a brand named Flagman: not the most expensive, it is rarely exported, presumably because the manufacturers don't see the need.