“Lifeless bodies were lying around the wine shops.” Historian Andrei Aksyonov on how alcohol helped the revolutionaries
Miscellaneous / / May 21, 2023
The main roles are the offended tsar, intriguing enemies and the drinking people.
Recently, the popularizer of history Andrey Aksyonov came out Pop Gapon and the Japanese Rifles. It contains fascinating notes about life under the tsar: for example, about how Leo Tolstoy helped the sectarians and what the “punks” were like in the Russian Empire. One of the interesting ones seemed to us the chapter about alcohol. We asked Andrei Aksyonov to talk about the significance of alcohol for the country and the revolution that destroyed the Russian monarchy.
Andrey Aksyonov
Author of the podcasts "The Decline of the Empire", "Time and Money". Wrote the book “Pop Gapon and Japanese Rifles. 15 amazing stories from pre-revolutionary Russia.
Vodka instead of iPhone
At the end of the 19th century scold the king was unsafe. One veiled way to do this was to criticize the problem of widespread drunkenness in the Russian Empire.
The fact is that at that time vodka was consumed publicly and indicatively. Drinking it in public was a way to show off your prestige. Then there were no iPhones and social networks where you could post a photo of “I am in the Maldives”, so on Sunday evening ordinary people came to drinking houses, loaded themselves there and fell asleep in a ditch.
Passers-by walked by, saw Vasily Ivanovich drunk in the bushes and thought: “What a man! And he knows how to work, and there is money to relax. Cool!"
Educated people understood that this was a complete horror: drunken fights were organized every Sunday, and lifeless bodies lay around the wine shops. The picture was terrible.
Although, if you look at the statistics of those years, you can see that the amount of alcohol per capita in some European countries was even higher than in our country. The only difference is that the culture consumption there was not so demonstrative and the problem was not evident so much.
Therefore, in 1893, the current Minister of Finance, Sergei Yulievich Witte, proposed in 1893 to introduce a wine monopoly in the country.
Wine monopoly for good
The wine monopoly had several global goals: to make the alcohol market more decent, to streamline the system taxation and increase income from the sale of alcohol.
I must say that even in the Moscow kingdom, the wine monopoly was periodically introduced in various forms and usually at the moment when the state needed money.
But Witte's reform can be called an administrative masterpiece, because it took into account many factors and really worked.
How it all looked in practice: factories across the country received an annual license for the production of vodka according to the state recipe. It could not be issued to everyone. Preference, for example, was given to factories that operate only in winter. Why? Because peasants were attracted to work for them, who worked in the field in the summer, and when the arable season ended, they were bored with nothing to do.
Factories supplied vodka to state-owned warehouses, where it was then bottled in standard containers and sent to wine shops. The latter, by the way, were also affected by the reform: it was forbidden to set up tables in them so that, having bought alcohol, drunkards would go home with it, and not drink in an institution. However, it did not work: people just drank vodka in one gulp at the exit of drinking houses and fell asleep at the doorsteps.
One of the tasks of the Witte reform was also the popularization of low-alcohol drinks. Supported wine producers and beer. A gram of alcohol in the latter was cheaper. The logic was this: if people wanted to get drunk, they were more likely to prefer beer, since the price of it is lower.
Gradually, the volume of beer production began to grow, although at first this drink was not familiar to the peasants. It was more difficult with wine, because its consumers are wealthy people who prefer French and Italian counterparts. But even wineries in the country has become more.
What the law on wine monopoly did not touch was private factories, which, even before the reform, produced alcohol that was inaccessible to the lower strata of the population. For example, the vodka they made cost five times as much.
As a result of all these transformations, people really began to drink a little less.
It was seen that the amount of alcohol consumption in general is not growing, the interest in low-alcohol drinks is increasing, and the number poisoning dropped a lot. The changes were positive.
Resentment and intrigue are political engines
In 1914, there is a foreign policy crisis in Europe: two large military blocs (France, Russia and Great Britain against Germany and Austria-Hungary) compete with each other. It's going to the First World war. According to the formal version, Russia gets involved in it because it fulfills allied obligations to Serbia. But in fact, in each of the participating countries there are groups of people who benefit from a foreign policy crisis, and they successfully use all the opportunities for a collision.
As a result, many countries, roughly speaking, find themselves in the middle of a war.
Changes are also taking place in domestic politics in Russia at this moment. Nicholas II announces the introduction of dry law. This solution looks very strange: as a result of it a country, already at war, is losing a quarter of the state budget received from the sale of alcohol.
Why was dry law introduced? It's a mystery. It is believed that partly due to personal reasons.
The fact is that after the introduction of the wine monopoly, the price of vodka became high enough to hit the pocket of the peasant, but not so much that he began to drive moonshine himself. This figure was calculated specifically, in accordance with the goals of the reform. However, in society, everything was perceived differently: in liberal newspapers, the idea that the tsar wants to make money by soldering the population was boosted.
These conversations formed in Nicholas II a huge resentment towards the liberals, so at some point he, relatively speaking, hit the table with his fist and said: “Then no alcohol at all during the war.”
Another factor is internal political intrigues. The introduction of dry law was supported by the former Minister of Finance Sergei Yulievich Witte, who was developing a project on a wine monopoly. He had his own reasons for this: by 1914, Witte had been removed from power for more than 10 years, but he really wanted to return to his previous position. To do this, he decided to frame the current Prime Minister, Vladimir Nikolaevich Kokovtsev.
Witte entered into an agreement with a couple of millionaires and with some major officials who led Nicholas II to the idea that Kokovtsev was making the wrong decisions for the state. For example, he holds on to the wine monopoly, while the tsar is criticized for it. The plan worked. As a result, Kokovtsev was indeed removed from his post, only Witte was not returned anywhere, and along the way, dry law was also introduced.
Prohibition and a step towards collapse
Of course, with the introduction of Prohibition, people get drunk didn't stop. This reform did not affect rich people: they, as before, could buy imported alcohol in restaurants and expensive private stores.
The poor strata of the population switched to surrogates - for example, they drank colognes or ate yeast. In the markets of Moscow and St. Petersburg, one could buy kvass diluted with alcohol. The latter, by the way, was bought under the counter from doctors, some citizens robbed pharmacies.
Another substitute for alcohol was denatured alcohol - technical alcohol, which was used at that time for the operation of lighting devices. It consisted of methanol, ethanol and fragrances that made people very sick. To get rid of the disgusting taste, they tried to somehow purify it by adding pepper, salt, milk, and garlic to the composition. All this was of little help.
Immediately began to grow the number of alcohol poisoning. Everything that the wine monopoly had previously struggled with has flourished again.
There were even several alcohol riots, but they were not associated with the introduction of Prohibition, but with the announcement of mobilization. Soldiers, former peasants, were driven to war. They understood that now they would go to the front and, possibly, they would die. Nothing worse could happen to them, so they wanted to get drunk finally. The only places where there is still a lot of alcohol left are state warehouses with vodka. They smashed them and got drunk right there. Everything looked completely useless. But what can you do? When the peasants sobered up, they were put in a wagon and taken to the front.
When this happened, in August 1914, the fate of the Russian Empire was already sealed.
At first it seemed to everyone that the war would last two or three months, but in the end it ended only after four years. In the end, the battle was attrition.
And Russia has not coped with the stress of this war. Resources - logistical, financial, media, political - were not enough to endure the stress. So the adoption of Prohibition is one of the many wrong decisions that led to the 1917 revolution.
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