Feeding the State

Abstract

How vodka provided the economic foundations of the tsarist Russian state from its invention in the sixteenth century. Examines the Bolsheviks’ contradictory approaches to alcohol: they railed against the tsarist alcohol monopoly as exploitation of the working classes, but came to adopt such a monopoly themselves once in power. In the 1920s the Bolsheviks were deeply divided as to what the Soviet approach to alcohol should be, which reflected a broader division within the Party as to how socialism should be built. Stalin’s approach of maximising alcohol sales to fund rapid industrialization prevailed, and from the start of the 1930s any discussion of alcohol problems within the USSR was silenced.