Abstract
Tsar Nicholas II banned vodka sales in 1914 for the duration of World War I. Believing that sobriety would result in an orderly recruitment process for the army and eliminate the drunkenness damaging public health, he failed to anticipate the negative unintentional consequences that ensued. The ban resulted in eliminating one-third of the state’s revenue at a time when it was most needed to support a prolonged war. Public demand for vodka resulted in grain being used to make samogon (moonshine). The reduction in available grain resulted in bread shortages in cities. On Women’s Day, March 8, 1917, women, workers, and students joined mass street demonstrations protesting food shortages, culminating in the abdication of the tsar a week later. When Vladimir Lenin seized power in November 1917, he retained Prohibition and took violent measures against moonshiners, realizing that feeding the urban masses was essential to retaining their loyalty. Josef Stalin created a State Vodka Monopoly to generate state revenue. In 1985, Michael Gorbachev drastically reduced the availability of vodka, resulting again in the production of moonshine and his unpopularity. Boris Yeltsin abolished the State Vodka Monopoly in 1992. Vladimir Putin continues to face rising male mortality rates, largely attributed to vodka consumption. Current tastes in drinking and a judicious tax policy hold out the hope of reducing the deleterious public health consequences of alcohol abuse in Russia.
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Notes
- 1.
Wine and beer were exempt unless local governments forbade all alcohol and most did. Other nations passed liquor bans as part of the war effort: France forbade absinthe for the duration, Belgium limited liquor sales, Australia limited pub hours, and Britain passed a series of local laws designed to reduce drinking opportunities (McGirr 2016, p. 32).
- 2.
See Christian (1995, pp. 117–118): timetable of restrictions and then relaxing of liquor laws in Russia between 1893 and 1925.
- 3.
The American diplomat George F. Kennan (1904–2005) was a cousin twice removed of George Kennan (b. 1846).
- 4.
http://today-in-wwi.tumblr.com/post/100564078885/vodka-permanently-banned-in-russia accessed August 14, 2016.
- 5.
Weissman (1986, p. 362): “Poorly distilled brew … often contained a high proportion of toxic fuel oil and harmful additives like tobacco, henbane, cocaine, benzine, kerosene and even sulphuric acid.”
- 6.
For a history of reforms of vodka taxation in the period of the Great Reforms, see Christian (1990, pp. 353–81).
- 7.
That is not to say that government ministries agreed on their preferences for increasing revenue or reducing vodka consumption. From the 1860s on, the Ministry of Internal Affairs attempted to limit the number of taverns and reduce drunkenness by other means because public disorder and crime were associated with drunkenness, while the Ministry of Finance attempted to maximize revenue by expanding sites for vodka sales (Abbott 2016, pp. 87–100).
- 8.
The monopoly was supposed to be a tool for curbing increased drunkenness. It was instituted when Russia embarked on a large industrialization project in the 1890s, so that increasing revenue was also a motive, although it was an unstated goal.
- 9.
Nicholas II, like Leo Tolstoy, advocated abstinence. Each had confessed to consuming too much alcohol in his youth. But as they grew older, both continued to drink wine, then not considered a strong alcoholic drink but renounced vodka, which they considered to be ruining the health of the Russian people.
- 10.
Despite the closeness of the Russian Orthodox Church and the state in tsarist Russia, the religious temperance societies were not under the aegis of the state. Many of them were highly critical of the regime because of its vodka monopoly and because the state did not advocate total abstinence (Herlihy 2002, pp. 69–89).
- 11.
See Herlihy (2002, pp. 132–139) for discussions of laws concerning vodka enacted by the Third Duma (1907–1912).
- 12.
There were 431 attendees, ranging from clerics to socialists, with many physicians, women, priests, teachers, members of local governmental boards (zemstva), and Duma members. Some 20 socialists were arrested at the meeting.
- 13.
“In the nineteenth century, government revenues from vodka were the major single source of government revenue, accounting on average for 30% of all ordinary revenue” (Christian 1995, p. 89). For a survey of the various forms of governmental taxes on vodka in tsarist times, see Kotsonis (2014) and Herlihy (2006).
- 14.
- 15.
Village “petitions from across the empire flooded government offices asking to close local drinking establishments and state liquor shops” Frank 1999, p. 296).
- 16.
Segal (1987, p. 119): “Objective data show that the 1914 Dry Law directly and drastically lowered the level of drunkenness in Russia.” Reports claimed that there were fewer asylum inmates, fires, and accidents, lost workdays, pledges at pawnshops, brawls, and less domestic violence and higher church attendance. Hercod (1919, pp. 9–22) based some of these findings on a survey of 1780 rural inhabitants taken by the Poltava Statistical Bureau. Going without vodka for family celebrations and hospitality appeared to be the most difficult thing for many, but they claimed to have adjusted after a while. They consumed more tea, kvass, syrups, lemonade, and even cocoa.
- 17.
Some wives were petitioning the government to let their husbands on the front have a ration of vodka. In March 1916, Nicholas II relented a bit by allowing weak wine to be sold at the front.
- 18.
The city known in English as St. Petersburg was changed to Petrograd in 1914, the start of World War I, because its original name sounded too German.
- 19.
Stone (1986, p. 374): “A direct relationship existed between the output of moonshine and the disparity in the prices of agricultural and industrial products. Whenever the gap widened, as it did in 1922–1923 and in 1927–1928, the volume of moonshine grew.”
- 20.
As early as 1918 in Petrograd, Bolshevik authorities meted out 10-year prison sentences to moonshiners. Sentences were reduced to 5 years’ hard labor in 1919 (see Williams 1991, p. 75).
- 21.
Williams (1991, p. 353): “During the summer of 1923 over half the prisoners in Moscow jails were home brewers.”
- 22.
There were opponents to the vodka monopoly such as Commissariat of Health N.I. Semashko, who indignantly asserted that “fiscal considerations [should] in no way dominate over the interests of the population for health and proper socialist development” (Weissman 1986, pp. 354–355).
- 23.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/blog/russia-alcohol-excise-duties accessed February 12, 2017.
- 24.
“For Russians, Bleak Times at Home,” https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/27/opinion/for-russians-bleak-realities-at-home.html, accessed February 12, 2017.
- 25.
See Herlihy (1991) for details about how deeply embedded in Russian culture drinking vodka had become over the centuries and the rites and rituals associated with the consumption of vodka.
- 26.
Falyakhov (2016), quoting Alexandra Burdyak, a senior researcher at RANEPA (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration). This author has noted that in Soviet times she was always offered vodka when visiting Russians. In the last decade or two, wine has been offered more frequently.
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Herlihy, P. (2017). The Russian Vodka Prohibition of 1914 and Its Consequences. In: Savona, E., Kleiman, M., Calderoni, F. (eds) Dual Markets. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65361-7_12
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