Even Lenin knew perfectly well that the Russians were able to drink even a revolution and an empire. The average Soviet tavern drank almost a liter of vodka a week! The leaders of the Soviet Union decided to change that. What were their amazing recipes for the victory of the proletariat on the alcohol front?
To this day, attempts are made to limit the availability of alcohol by reducing the number of places where you can get it. In the Soviet Union, this method, of course, turned into a caricature. The number of points selling alcohol for Brezhnev has been drastically reduced.
This caused enormous discontent, especially in Siberia and the far north. In the frost of several dozen degrees, the labor leaders marched several kilometers to the only store ... only to find out that it no longer sells alcohol.
The entire distribution reform was soon canceled. As a "compensation" in areas with particularly low temperatures, a new, legal drinking spirit was launched. And not just any, it is 95%!
Another attempt to limit the number of places where you can buy alcohol was made several years later by Gorbachev. As they write in their latest book "Grażdanin N.N. Everyday life in the USSR ” Marta Panas-Goworska and Andrzej Goworski, overnight most of the liquor stores were closed. In those that remained, could not buy more than a liter of vodka at a time . What was the effect? Only that after making the purchase, the culprit again stood in a long queue. He made the wait pleasant, emptying the drinks he had already bought.
Many delinquents would be happy to buy alcohol supplies off the shelves. And if it was not possible ... then they had to consume the next bottles in the queue. Fragment of the Soviet anti-alcohol poster.
Prohibition is not an American invention!
When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the alcohol problem was temporarily pacified. In 1914, in the face of mobilization, Tsar Nicholas II ordered the introduction of partial prohibition throughout the empire. He decided (somewhat naively) that the restrictions on access to alcohol would have a positive effect on the fighting spirit of the Russian army. Batiushka pushed through the absolute ban on alcohol trade. The exceptions were restaurants - the people could get drunk there.
Lenin initially continued the anti-alcohol course adopted by the tsar. But times have changed. The war is over. The new authorities were not very successful in providing the society with bread. So ... the games remained. And it's best of the cheapest. So gradually began to withdraw from prohibition. First, wine was legalized, then beer, and finally, under Stalin, vodka also returned to the shops. How did the dictator justify the return of alcohol drinks? Well, they had - of course! - make a significant contribution to the victory of the revolution:
Which is better: slavery of foreign capital or introduction of vodka - that was the issue before us. It is obvious that we have decided to buy vodka (...) we believe that if we have to get a little muddy because of the victory of the proletariat and the peasantry, then we will decide on this last resort for the good of our cause.
Madhouse
In the USSR, great social campaigns against alcoholism were organized. However, an innovative "individual program" was directed to the units most demoralized by drunkenness. Notorious alcoholics were directed to compulsory treatment… to insane asylums, or dorks.
From 1958, psychiatric toxicology offices were established there. Addiction therapy specialists were to be admitted there. It turned out, however, that in the scale of this huge country there were only a few hundred of them! In practice, therefore, even under Brezhnev, alcoholics stayed in the centers together with other patients suffering from mental diseases. You can guess that it was not conducive to the recovery of either of them.
The implementation of a noble addiction treatment program also left a lot to be desired. It was possible to end up in durdom because of minor conflicts with the law caused by alcohol. Some agreed to treatment to avoid being fired for drunkenness. There were also ochlaptus-volunteers who treated a stay in a psychiatric ward as a way to improve their health.
Some voluntary workers applied for psychiatric treatment only so that they would not be fired ... Soviet anti-alcohol poster.
Not only did they come up with this idea. Many people volunteered at the centers, not because of the sudden desire to get out of the addiction, but because of… the excellent food that was offered there. They even had cream, not counting butter, cheese or eggs and of course meat - one of the patients recalls fondly, quoted in the book " Grażdanin N.N. Everyday life in the USSR ”.
"Therapy" was forced labor in the light industry, for example, assembling pens. Alcoholics received a national average wage for it. Its effectiveness is evidenced by the fact that after each day they usually counted how many bottles they earned and how they would get drunk after leaving ...
In factories, patients were also treated by giving them sulfozinum or disulfiram. The ladies greatly appreciated the free therapy with the first of these measures, which caused not only an aversion to alcohol, but also an instant weight loss. The second drug developed gag reflexes with alcohol. It was often used via the Esperal tab. In order for the patient not to be tempted to take it out, it was inserted "intravenously", that is, it was sewn deep in the buttock.
TV therapy sessions with the cult phrase "Odin, two, tri ..." were conducted by Anatoly Kaszpirowski. Photo from the conference from 2016 (photo:Annenkoan, license CC BY-SA 4.0).
TV hypnosis sessions
Not all alcoholics could be locked up in asylums. Fortunately, there were also alternative therapies. One of them was offered by the doctor Dovzhenko, who was visiting Crimea. He treated drunks… with hypnosis.
At the entrance, he enchanted them with a wonderful perspective: You have comrades, half an hour of reflection for how long you want to get rid of the spirits. There is free choice, democracy, define yourselves. Patients could choose between a year and a lifetime declaration. Once they made their decision, Dovzhenko put them into a state of hypnosis. He kept telling them that if they drank a little alcohol they would die.
Hypnosis by the method of Dr. Dowżenko, "specialist in national medicine and herbal medicine, as well as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and hypnotist" in 1984 was even patented! And because it did not require much investment, it became extremely popular. Unfortunately, the number of people the hypnotic king could accept was very limited and the costs of a trip to the Black Sea were high.
In this situation, most addicts were forced to choose the "economic option", that is, the vision magnetizing and captivating voice of Anatoly Kaszpirowski on the Rubin color TV: Odin, two, tri ... Your diseases are receding ...
The author of the "genius" idea of producing low-percentage vodka was the Prime Minister of the USSR, Alexey Rykov. Photo from 1924 (public domain).
Reduce the sugar content of sugar
Soviet leaders early, in the mid-1920s, had yet another idea to combat alcoholism. Since high-percent alcohol harmed Soviet citizens the most, they thought, it would be enough to simply reduce the concentration of pure alcohol. And so, in 1925, fire water with an ethanol content of ... 20% was introduced to the market. In the (dubious) honor of Prime Minister Alexei Rykov, it was called rykówka .
Predictably, the nation reacted with a conspiratorial but loud cackle. More than one wine was knocked off the feet more and more cheaply ... Mikhail Bulgakov, author of "The Master and Margarita" , he mocked in his journal that the new vodka is twice as weak, four times more expensive than the Tsar's vodka, and it tastes much worse.
Leonid Brezhnev (otherwise himself an industrial drunk) had more sense. He ordered the withdrawal of vodka stronger than 50% from production. Even this decision was met with menacing murmurs of national discontent.
The article was based on, among others, the latest book by Marta Panas-Goworska and Andrzej Goworski, entitled "Grażdanin N.N. Everyday life in the USSR ”(Polish Scientific Publishers PWN 2017).
Drastically reducing alcohol production nationwide
The final challenge to Soviet drunkenness was put by Gorbachev's young team, largely made up of abstainers. The right-hand man of the gensek, Yegor Ligachev, approached the case with truly neo-fiery enthusiasm. The production of all alcoholic beverages was drastically limited by one decree. During the year, the production of vodka decreased by half!
The nation's response was fairly predictable. Cheap sugar was swept from the market. The demand was so great that it started to be spent on cards again. The shortages in supplies also affected the cologne and brake fluid. All products related to the chemical composition of ethanol in any way were bought up. The state also suffered from the revolutionary solutions. The financial effect of the two-year campaign was catastrophic. Budget revenues fell by 20%! Ligachev admitted his defeat years later:
We thought alcoholism was manageable. I thought that any normal person can exist without consuming alcohol regularly and frequently. Password: " For total sobriety! ” I consider it my big mistake.
Yegor Ligachev, the right-hand man of the abstinent gensek, set about exterminating alcoholism with great verve ... but he had completely ignored the side effects of his actions. In this 1989 photo, taken during a visit to the GDR, he is greeted by the hostess of Meta Krüger (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1989-0913-045, license CC-BY-SA 3.0).
The whole situation was philosophically summed up by Nikolai Zenkovich, the author of books on the backstage of Russian history: Gorbachev did not understand it - people drink not only because there is a lot of vodka, but because this is their life.
Clear the vineyards!
The Gorbachev-Ligaczow duo, trying to fight national drunkenness, did not stop at the decree limiting the production of vodka. Reflecting on the origins of alcoholism, Soviet leaders set out to fix the problem at its literal root. What if you got rid of the ingredients the percentages are made of? Wouldn't that be good?
Limiting the cultivation of the national treasure of potatoes ( bulbs ), of course, was not an option. But innocent grapes have fallen victim to anti-alcohol engineering. In the southern fringes of the empire, overzealous apparatchiks undertook massive clearing of vineyards. More than half of the acreage has been destroyed! This is what Zieńkowicz recalls:
In the Caucasus, Crimea, Moldova, almost all vines were cut - the same one that has been carefully cultivated for decades. During the war, when the Crimea was leaving, especially valuable grapevines were transported by submarines to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. And in the 'eighty-fifth, [the Soviets] themselves mowed everything up, destroyed (...)
If people cannot be forbidden to cultivate potatoes, then they can at least grub up the vineyards ... Due to such ideas, many valuable varieties of the south were wasted. Despite this, Georgian winemaking is slowly developing. The photo shows a vineyard in Kakheti (photo:Levan Gokadze, license CC BY-SA 2.0).
Dozens of costly wine bottling lines were scrapped, wonderful oak barrels, which contained two thousand buckets of wine must, were destroyed. In Georgia and Armenia, local decision-makers forced the villagers to pour wine on the ground from large wooden vats, and in order to prevent its production in the future, they poured kerosene into empty containers inherited from their grandfathers.
During the year, wine production in the Soviet Union decreased by 65%. Gorbachev could be satisfied with the currency of the recipient of Georgian or Moldavian wine a little less.
Bibliography:
- Marta Panas-Goworska, Andrzej Goworski , Grażdanin N.N. Everyday life in the USSR , Polish Scientific Publishers PWN 2017.
- Kamil Janicki, Drunken war. Alcohol during World War II, Ed. Erica 2012.
- Adam Kaczyński, Percentages in trenches. The history of vodka on the Soviet front during World War II , Polska Zbrojna and Wirtualna Polska.
- Andrzej Łomanowski, Russian soul, " Life ”March 15, 2002.
- Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Empire. Drunken politics from Lenin to Putin , crowd. Aleksandra Czwojdrak, WUJ 2015.
- Vodka - technology to drink people, Russian production movie, YouTube.
- Nikolai Zieńkowicz, Secrets of the passing age, crowd. Janusz Derwojed, Janusz Sztetyłło, Prószyński i S-ka, 1999.