Vodka is regarded by the Russians as the "water of life". The word vodka is derived from the Slavic word "vodka", which means exactly "water" in Slavic. It is no wonder that the fighting peoples drank vodka as water.
We can often see on the Internet that Russian uncles drink unconsciously every day with a bottle of wine, a sour cucumber, a piece of pickled raw meat, you can properly drink a whole bottle. In Russia, from the leaders of the country to the ordinary people, all of them have a preference for alcohol.
Peter the Great, a famous man in history, once held a drinking contest with the Duke of Courland at a wedding banquet, and finally drank the other party to death. Russia's first president, Yeltsin, once misbehaved with drinking, and in the middle of the night, he actually wore only a pair of shorts to stop a taxi to buy pizza.
The first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin
In 2016, the Russian city of Irkutsk even killed 52 people because they drank illegal local self-brewed liquor, resulting in the tragic death of 52 people. The level of rotten wine of the fighting nation is unprecedented, and the authorities know the harm of this bad wine habit to Russia.
In the history of Russia, the official has come out to ban alcohol many times, but it cannot stand the Russian love of alcohol, and the final prohibition action has ended in failure.
Nicholas II was destroyed by prohibition
As the last Tsar, Nicholas II actually wanted to create Russia well, but the country was already in turmoil when it came to him. The russo-Japanese war was lost to the outside world, leaving the old empire with no face.
Internally, we have to face the red whirlwind blown by Lenin. In the face of internal and external troubles, Nicholas II thought of taking the wine that the Russians depended on for their survival.
Nicholas II
After all, during the Russo-Japanese War, there were large-scale drunken situations in the Russian army, one by one drunk in the dark, on the battlefield, and even many soldiers suffered from mental illness because of excessive drinking. Nicholas II blamed all this on alcohol.
After losing the Russo-Japanese War, Russia not only lost a large number of overseas colonies, but also its international status took a sharp turn for the worse, and it has been squeezed out of the ranks of great powers by rising Japan.
Nicholas II looked at the Russian soldiers who were crooked from side to side, and also hated iron and steel, and at the sound of an order, began a vigorous prohibition movement.
In early 1914, Nicholas II issued a decree declaring that he would improve the economic situation of the people by banning alcohol "without fear of financial losses", and Nicholas II's prohibition policy was supported by the elite.
They also saw that the growing culture of drinking had seriously damaged Russia's national interests, and even Lenin initially supported the prohibition of alcohol, lenin said in general: Vodka and other poisons will lead us to the era of capitalism.
However, dreams are beautiful, but reality is cruel. As a fighting nation, how can you bear the pain of eating three meals a day without wine and drinking? People's complaints have been repeated, and they have demanded that the government lift the prohibition.
At the same time, some bootleg liquor began to spread underground in Russia. In order to implement prohibition to the end, the Tsar dispatched police forces to confront the bootleggers to the end, and a series of conflicts broke out.
Later, Lenin saw that the road to prohibition would not work in Russia, and he announced that he would no longer support Prohibition. A liquor called "Riccocca" was also produced instead of vodka. As a result, more people fell to Lenin.
Lenin
Nicholas II remained obstinate and held his ground. As we know, the storm of the October Revolution swept through Russia and Nicholas II's family was shot.
The torrent of history cannot be stopped, and although Nicholas II's loss of the country cannot be completely blamed on Prohibition, Prohibition is also an important factor that cannot be ignored. He banned Russia's "source of life" and made the public opinion, which was already complaining, even more boiling.
At the same time, the tax loss caused by Prohibition also caused a lot of damage to the treasury of the last tsar. It takes courage to fight the national prohibition of alcohol, and Nicholas II is also a commendable courage, but he failed to defeat the Russian "drunkards".
Gorbachev lost 67 billion to prohibition
When it came to the Soviet period, the leaders of the Soviet Union also liked to drink. Stalin was particularly fond of drinking a craft brandy from his native Georgia. Khrushchev was a big fan of vodka, and later Brezhnev, he was also drunk.
Leaders like to drink, and the soldiers below naturally can't drag their feet. During World War II, vodka was supplied to the front as a necessity for Soviet soldiers. At that time, the Soviet Ministry of Defense stipulated that 100 grams of vodka rations must be provided to soldiers on the front line every day.
Without these vodkas, there would be no strong fighting power of Soviet soldiers. It can even be said that vodka also contributed to the defense of Stalingrad, during which the Stalingrad Front consumed a total of 407,000 liters of vodka.
This state of all-in-one hi-hi continued until Gorbachev came to power. That was in the 1980s, a critical phase in the struggle for hegemony between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev watched the Soviet Union being left behind by the United States and wondered how to take back another city. Gorbachev first thought of taking wine to open the knife. The Soviet Union had been drunk for so many years, and it was time to sober up.
As soon as Gorbachev became general secretary of the CPSU, he summoned the top leaders of the Soviet Union and convened a politburo meeting dedicated to the prohibition of alcohol. At the meeting, Gorbachev talked about the harm of drinking alcohol and pointed out that strict measures should be taken to ban alcohol.
During the conference, some Soviet leaders pointed out that prohibition could cause various social problems, and even impact the national budget, causing losses of tens of billions of rubles to the Soviet Union.
But Gorbachev ignored all this, and he said angrily: Are you going to enter communism in vodka?
In 1985, Gorbachev, who had just been general secretary of the CPSU for two months, promulgated the Measures for the Elimination of Alcoholism. Gorbachev's prohibition was the strictest in Russian history.
A large number of vodka production plants and sales shops were directly closed, and even soviet embassies abroad were banned from drinking alcohol. In order to cut off the raw materials for wine production, Gorbachev also ordered the use of bulldozers to reach the vineyards of Crimea, Georgia and Moldova.
With the launch of the prohibition campaign, the Soviet Union's alcohol reserves were getting smaller and smaller, the import of alcohol was almost stagnant, and it was almost impossible to buy alcohol on the street. In order to cut off the Soviets' desire to drink, Gorbachev even banned yogurt because he suspected that it contained alcohol.
Prohibition in the Soviet Union also affected many Warsaw Pact countries. Usually, the Soviet Union was a big buyer of these Warsaw Pact distilleries, but in an instant the Soviet Union stopped purchasing, and the wineries of these Warsaw Pact countries closed down within a few months.
The distillery went out of business
History is always strikingly similar, and as long as the country introduces a strict prohibition on alcohol, it will lead to the proliferation of private liquor. The Russians' dependence on alcohol has reached a terrifying level, and forcing them to drink is tantamount to killing them.
So the private liquor industry began to flourish, and everyone secretly drank at home. Because of this, the Soviet Union's Prohibition was ridiculed by Western countries.
They ridiculed Gorbachev's prohibition order, which not only failed to abstain from alcohol, but increased the number of drunkards in the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Western countries also took this opportunity to attack the ideology of the Soviet Union and use the guise of democracy and freedom to shock the hearts of the Soviet people.
As Gorbachev's Prohibition deepened, various contradictions began to stand out. The first is the reduction of fiscal revenue, which closes a large number of distilleries while also cutting off this part of the financial resources.
Liquor companies are a large contributor to tax revenue, especially in the Soviet Union, where the liquor market is huge and the tax contribution is staggering. According to later statistics, during Gorbachev's prohibition, the Soviet Union lost a total of 67 billion rubles.
Second, the implementation of Prohibition will bring many social problems. Due to the closure of the distillery, a large number of workers suffered unemployment, and this group of unemployed people was quite large, and the Soviet Union at that time did not deal with the resettlement of this part of the workers.
And the emergence of illegal liquor manufacturing because of Prohibition has also spawned some underworld organizations. During Gorbachev's prohibition period, the market for the manufacture of bootleg liquor was quite large and the profits were staggering.
Driven by interests, scattered criminal acts will gradually degenerate into organized crime, and finally become a cancer on society.
Again, Gorbachev's Prohibition was too strong, touching the fundamental needs of most Russians, and the public complained a lot about the government, leading to a tarnishing image of the Soviet leader.
This series of problems was exposed to Gorbachev, and he eventually had to choose to bow to alcohol. In 1988, Gorbachev renounced Prohibition. However, even if everyone was allowed to drink vodka again, the Soviet Union still could not escape the doom of disintegration.
In the Putin era, a mild prohibition mode was opened
Given the bitter lessons of previous prohibitions, Putin's current ban in Russia is much milder. The Putin government has mainly strengthened the control of liquor production enterprises, strictly controlled the issuance of production licenses, and all liquor production equipment must be registered for the record.
At the same time, through the revision of legal provisions, alcohol advertising on the Internet, newspapers and magazines has been prohibited, which is similar to China's cigarette control measures.
In some areas with serious drinking problems, the time for selling alcohol is also restricted, stipulating that alcohol cannot be sold between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m. the next day. In May 2020, the age of the people who buy alcohol was also raised from 18 to 21.
In the Putin era, the Russian government did make a lot of efforts in banning alcohol, no longer as radical as before, and more expected to guide the people to drink in moderation.
But the results were not ideal, and problems caused by drunkenness still abound in Russia, and it may be a long way before the fighting people can truly awaken from alcohol.