Vodka and tea

Reading lots of history has taught me something important: it's basically a fluke of luck that America's political parties are called what they are.

"Whig" and "Tory" are both corruptions of Gaelic insults. Sweden during the Age of Liberty had Hats and Caps. And in 1848, the Germans assembled at the Frankfurt Parliament broke down into Fraktionen named after the places they went to drink. The revolutionists who topple Evgeny the Old fell somewhere in between.
On the one hand, they started off as (inevitably outlawed) political movements, and usually named their parties for a certain degree of mass appeal. On the other hand, though, most of them are known by quirky historical shorthands - the Gegenniks, for instance, who revolved around the pre-Revolutionary journal Gegen.

The state that they built, whatever it's called this year, doesn't need to distinguish between the parties terribly much: as long as they maintain the brigades of the Legion, none of them is going to be leaving the Coalition any time soon. The most important distinctions, therefore, fall into one of two camps: Vodka, and Tea.

The Russian Tea Party

Russia's economy went to pieces after the Easter Revolt. First there came the Civil War, with various Tsarists contending against various Vechists; then there came the rolling series of wars with most of their neighbors. By the time things had stabilized, Great Russia had spent almost a decade running on a war economy, and everything was being rationed.

Among the rationed commodities was tea, which was important because some of the war government's leadership [who?] had made tea an important rhetorical point. ("A chicken in every pot" was unimaginable when Hoover made it a campaign promise in 1928; hell, it was a long-term goal for King Henri IV. I'm not sure what the catchphrase was about tea, but in the spoken Russian of Andalusada it'd be synonymous.) It was the first campaign promise in Russian history to be broken, and as rationing (and the occasional hoarding scandal) continued the opposing factions in the Sobor [who?] made hay of it.

Tea vs. Vodka

I don't know the details yet, but Great Russia's political parties aren't actually called the Tea and Vodka parties. "Tea" and "Vodka" are the shorthands for tendencies within the parties of the Great Coalition.

• To be a "Tea" politician is to be associated with intelligentsia, statism, a certain strain of urban elitism, and (originally, at least) a tendency towards compromise and creature comforts. (In their defense, Tea is usually willing to cross the aisle; if any party in the present-day Coalition lost its Tea wing, the government would stall.)
• "Vodka" politicians, by contrast, are aggressively revolutionist, backing the Veche (and their party) and taking stronger ideological lines. (The 1921 coup [describe?], when one of the *White defectors turned on the Vechist government, was anticipated and cracked down on hardest by Vodka leadership, which has worryingly close ties to the Russian Legions.) They're strong, they're pure, and (especially in political humor) they're drunk.

The lines aren't quite as clear-cut as that, of course. While it's the vocally republican camp, Vodka tends to be associated with the status quo (because it has a lot of investment with the Legions, who are loyal not to the state but the government); some smaller parties generally support Tea regardless of how hardline they are. (For its part, Vodka has a certain amount of avant-garde sectarianism too, which the "elitist" Tea has played on in the past.)