A year ago I was driving in an armoured convoy in thick fog through
the plains of northern Chechnya. We had just visited Russian troops besieging
the Chechen capital, Grozny. Suddenly the personnel carriers stopped. This
made us a little nervous because a Russian divisional commander had just
told us that there were still sporadic rebel attacks in the area and the
fog seemed to offer perfect cover for any guerrilla sniper.
The Russian soldiers with the convoy offered no explanation for the
halt. There was a rumour that one of the vehicles had got lost. The real
explanation only became apparent when a personnel carrier emerged through
the fog with a soldier on top clutching bottles of vodka. Other soldiers
produced plastic cups and tins of pickled herring. Despite the war and
the fog our guards felt that this was as good a moment as any to hold a
party.
Russians have always been famously heavy drinkers. A thousand years
ago an early Slav leader reputedly chose Christianity over Islam on the
grounds that his people would never accept the Islamic prohibition on alcohol.
But the revolutionaries of 1917 saw alcoholism as one of the nastier consequences
of the old regime. For over 70 years, up to the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991, the Communist government waged a prolonged, if ultimately
unsuccessful, campaign against drunkenness. Posters, usually highly coloured
and wonderfully graphic, were one of the main weapons in the state's propaganda
against drink. Now preserved in the Museum of the Contemporary History
of Russia, in Moscow, they were one of the most vigorous and interesting
forms of art to flourish during the Soviet period.
The first posters blame the Tsarist autocracy for encouraging drinking
through its monopoly control over the production of spirits. This was an
important source of state revenues. One early poster called The Reign of
Nicholas the Last, designed by the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky,
shows Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra clutching green bottles while
gold coins cascade from Alexandra's lap into a sack. On one side of the
royal couple a drunken peasant lies collapsed in a green field and on the
other an inebriated worker outside a factory clutches on to a lamp-post
to support himself.
Some of these early posters are not much different from Western temperance
propaganda, though of higher quality. The emphasis is on the drunkard as
a menace to himself and others. One shows a worker in a bar upending a
table as he attacks a man with a bottle. But many pictures associate heavy
drinking, particularly of samogon, the Russian moonshine, with the political
enemies of the new regime. A bearded peasant, for example, is depicted
being strangled by metal piping from a samogon still, while a rich farmer
and a priest sit grinning cheerily perched on the edge of the still.
In the Thirties the propaganda takes on a new and more menacing tone.
The heavy drinker is portrayed as an economic saboteur, an enemy not just
of himself but of the people and the Five-Year Plan. Lenin is quoted as
saying: "Vodka and other poisons will lead us back to capitalism." A worker
is shown striking with a sledgehammer at a bottle with a snake around it.
Artists no longer draw alcoholics as impoverished down-and-outs but as
malicious conspirators.
Under Stalin the words on the temperance posters also get harsher. A
denunciation of alcoholism reads, "Let's tear it out by the roots!" and
another, "Beat the enemy of the cultural revolution." Drinking is linked
with keeping religious holidays such as Christmas, Easter and even Sunday,
which the Communists were seeking to replace with revolutionary holidays.
Drunks are shown being egged on by priests and a Christmas cake lies beside
an empty bottle. One poster reads: "It's clear what is going on - the priest
and the drunkard are both saboteurs."
In the aftermath of the war, posters returned to the old themes but
with less denunciatory zeal. They attack the occasional drinker as well
as the drunk. One picture shows a smartly dressed policeman admonishing
a tousled man in a suit who has just broken an ornamental tree in a tub.
A drunken farmer is portrayed stretched out beside his combine harvester
in a golden wheat field. A smouldering cigarette has just dropped from
his hand.
Posters produced by individual factories began to show the faces of
real drunkards. For the first time drugs come under attack. A poster, published
in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, in 1964, portrays a drooping opium poppy flower
beside a bottle.
There was an element of hypocrisy in all this. The state monopoly on
vodka was restored in 1925. As under the Tsars, vodka was a major source
of revenue. Members of the elite still drank. At a party in Moscow celebrating
the recapture of Kiev in 1943, drink was so plentiful that diplomats were
carried out unconscious and the British ambassador, after numerous toasts,
fell forward on to the table, cutting his face on broken glass.
According to William Pokhlebkin in his fascinating book The History
of Vodka the combination of propaganda and draconian laws on work-discipline
had their effect. He argues that it was after the death of Stalin in 1953
that mass drunkenness spread once more among the Soviet working class as
wages rose and penalties for drinking were curtailed. By the Seventies
"people had come to perceive the abuse of alcohol not as a social but as
a personal matter. It was no longer possible to evoke a popular contempt
for drunkards."
When Mikhail Gorbachev, who at that time saw himself as a born-again
Leninist, was elected Communist party leader in 1985, one of his first
acts was to start a campaign against drunkenness. It was conducted with
cavalry-charge crudity. The price of vodka was raised. Distilleries were
dismantled. Vineyards in Georgia and other wine-producing districts were
rooted up. The press publicised raids on villages revealing that every
house possessed a samogon still. Russia's Pacific fishing fleet was declared
officially dry - but a raid on one trawler discovered no less than 576
bottles of vodka purchased for a crew member's wedding celebration.
Posters focused on criticising aspects of Soviet social life which required
giving or receiving a bottle of vodka. One shows harried householders all
vying for the attention of a service worker to fix their plumbing by offering
vodka. Another attacks the obligation of a newly hired worker to give a
bottle each to members of the staff of the enterprise he has just joined.
But overall the posters of the Gorbachev era are anaemic and lacking in
conviction compared to those that went before. The best is of a small boy
in a field of flowers taking aim at a flying vodka bottle with his tennis
racket.
In 1991, with the fall of Communism, the long tradition of the anti-alcohol
poster ended. Arkady Slesarev, in charge of posters at the Museum of Contemporary
History, says: "Now nobody struggles against alcohol. Instead you see advertising
for drink everywhere." Indeed, as the economy collapsed
in the early Nineties, Russia went on a drinking binge which led to
a spectacular fall in life expectancy among men. The victory of vodka was
symbolised by the presence of President Boris Yeltsin, often visibly drunk,
in the Kremlin.
Probably the anti-alcohol campaign was always doomed to fail. Historically
all Europeans in the north of the continent, from Scotland to Finland,
have consumed spirits. But spirit drinking is more deeply rooted in Russia
than in other countries. It is not just the amount of alcohol consumed
which produces spectacular drunkenness, but the fact that vodka is drunk
neat without a mixer. Optimists said that, with the spread of Western influence,
beer might displace vodka as a favourite tipple. The latest figures show
that Russians are indeed consuming beer in great quantities, but have not
cut down on their vodka drinking
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