Stalinism and alcoholism in the Soviet Union (10)

“Socialism in one country”, the vodka monopoly and the Stalinist roots of Soviet alcoholism

Leon Trotsky, 1923. That same year, Trotsky opposed the attempt to base the state budget on revenue from vodka sales, warning that it would have disastrous consequences for both the working class and the Soviet state.

In the earlier instalments of this series, we examined the origins of the anti-alcohol campaign launched by Mikhail Gorbachev’s administration in May 1985, the measures it introduced, the large hole it left in the Soviet budget, its relative successes in the early years, and the crisis into which it subsequently descended. At the same time, we sought to show just how serious a social, economic and demographic problem alcoholism had become in Soviet society by the mid-1980s.

Yet one crucial question remains: how did the alcohol problem in the Soviet Union reach such proportions?

This cannot be explained solely by the drinking culture inherited from Tsarist Russia. One of the major roots of the mass scale of alcoholism in the Soviet Union must be sought in the Stalinist bureaucracy’s decision, from the mid-1920s onwards, to make revenue from the production and sale of vodka a permanent component of state finances.

This history is also the history of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet workers’ state.

The October Revolution and the “drunkards’ budget”

When the Bolsheviks came to power, the ban on vodka sales was already in place. It had been introduced by the Tsarist government during the First World War as part of a broader prohibition on strong alcoholic drinks. Rather than abolishing the ban, however, the Soviet government maintained it and gave it a different social and political content.

“Fight against samogon!” A Soviet
propaganda poster from the 1920s.

The decree of 19 December 1919, bearing Lenin’s signature, prohibited the unauthorised production of strong alcoholic drinks and their sale for consumption. During the NEP period, this ban was gradually relaxed; from 1921 onwards, the sale of wines below certain alcohol strengths was permitted. The resumption of state production and sale of vodka, however, was a very different matter - and one of principle.[*]

In his 1923 article Vodka, the Church and the Cinema, Trotsky emphasised that the October Revolution regarded the abandonment of the tsarist “drunkards’ budget” as a historic achievement. In his view, the abolition of a system under which the state raised revenue by encouraging people to drink was one of the gains of the revolution.

For precisely this reason, the prospect of re-legalising vodka sales in the summer of 1923 in order to raise revenue for the state budget was of considerable significance.

The timing, too, was striking. By then, Lenin had effectively withdrawn from political life because of his serious illness. Stalin, meanwhile, had been General Secretary since April 1922 and was rapidly consolidating his position within the party apparatus.

When the proposal to restore state production and sale of vodka was raised at the June 1923 Plenum of the Central Committee, Trotsky vehemently opposed it. In the letter and draft resolution he sent to members of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, he drew attention to two major dangers.

Firstly, the state budget would acquire a source of revenue independent of the successes of economic construction. Secondly, raising state revenue from the population’s consumption of alcohol would have a demoralising effect on the working class and reduce workers’ real wages.

In other words, the problem was not merely alcoholism. Who was to bear the burden of financing industrialisation and the state budget?

Yevgeny Preobrazhensky

Moreover, the debate itself soon became intertwined with the issue of the bureaucratisation of the party regime. On 12 July 1923, the very day Trotsky’s article Vodka, the Church and the Cinema appeared in Pravda, the Politburo, at a meeting from which Trotsky was absent, decided that no further articles discussing vodka sales should be published in the newspaper. Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, a member of Pravda’s editorial board who opposed this censorship decision, was removed from the board shortly afterwards.

On 8 October 1923, in his famous letter to members of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission, Trotsky drew a direct connection between two developments: the apparatus of the Secretariat, which was becoming increasingly independent of the party, and the attempt to create a budget as independent as possible of the successes of economic construction.

The vodka budget and bureaucratisation were becoming two sides of the same historical process.[**]

The return of state vodka

Resistance from Trotsky and his supporters delayed this reversal for a time, but could not prevent it. On 25 August 1925, the state production and sale of vodka were officially legalised once again.

The timing of this decision is particularly striking.

Stalin had begun systematically to formulate the theory of “socialism in one country” towards the end of 1924; by the Fourteenth Party Conference in April 1925, the thesis that the Soviet Union could build “a complete socialist society” by its own efforts had become one of the central political and programmatic pillars of the Stalinist centre.

It is important, however, not to draw a mechanical cause-and-effect relationship here. The debate over the vodka budget had begun in 1923, before the theory of “socialism in one country” was formulated. It would therefore be historically inaccurate to claim that the restoration of the vodka monopoly derived directly from this theory.

An advertisement for state-produced
vodka in the Soviet Union. 

Yet the two were part of the same broader historical transformation.

For the bureaucracy, which had turned away from the perspective of world revolution and was consolidating its own rule within the national boundaries of the Soviet state, one of the central questions was how to secure the immense resources required for industrialisation.

The Opposition advocated accelerating planned industrialisation, imposing heavier taxes on the NEP bourgeoisie and the kulaks, preserving the monopoly of foreign trade, and combining all these measures with an expansion of the working class’s democratic involvement within the party, the Soviets, the trade unions and the management of the economy.

The Stalinist centre, while opposing this line in the mid-1920s, turned instead, among other sources of revenue, to the population’s consumption of alcohol.

In his political report to the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925, Stalin explicitly listed vodka as one of the “reserve sources” on which the state could draw in the face of a shortage of capital and foreign credit.[***]

Trotsky repeatedly warned that this would have grave consequences. In October 1924, he drew attention to the economic contradiction inherent in the claim that state vodka would combat samogon - illicit home-distilled spirits. If the state sold vodka at a high price in order to generate substantial revenue for the budget, the peasants would continue to distil their own liquor; if, on the other hand, it sold vodka cheaply enough to compete with samogon, the rationale for using vodka as a source of budget revenue would disappear.

By the end of 1925, the consequences were already becoming apparent. Trotsky observed that state vodka had taken root in the cities without displacing samogon in the countryside, lowering workers’ living standards, stunting their cultural development and weakening the authority of the state in workers’ eyes.

The figures likewise showed a rapid increase. Per capita vodka consumption rose from 0.6 bottles in the 1924/25 economic year to 2.9 in 1925/26 and 4.3 bottles in 1926/27.

The Counter-Theses on the Five-Year Plan, issued by the United Opposition in 1927, went further still. To claim that vodka revenues contributed to industrialisation was misleading, because alcohol-related absenteeism, careless workmanship, defective goods, damage to machinery, accidents, fires and injuries were costing industry hundreds of millions of roubles.

According to the Opposition, the losses inflicted on state industry by vodka were no less than the revenue it generated for the state budget. For this reason, state sales of vodka should be brought to an end within two or three years.

Stalin’s response was that the measure was an “extraordinary and temporary expedient” and would be abandoned as soon as new sources of revenue became available.

Subsequent developments would show precisely the opposite.

The “temporary” measure becomes permanent

From 1928-29 onwards, the Stalinist centre turned to the accelerated industrialisation it had previously opposed, pursuing it through extremely harsh and bureaucratic methods. While vast resources were extracted from the peasantry through forced collectivisation and compulsory grain deliveries, the working class bore the heavy burden of industrialisation through low levels of consumption, increasing labour intensity and various fiscal mechanisms.

Stalin and Molotov, Moscow, 1933.

The vodka monopoly likewise became one of the mechanisms through which these resources were extracted.

Stalin’s letter to Molotov in September 1930 reveals the logic of this policy in all its starkness. To secure the resources required for defence and large-scale construction projects, Stalin demanded that “false shame” be set aside and vodka production increased as much as possible.

The timing of this demand was also striking: it came on the eve of a period in which forced collectivisation was causing enormous social and economic upheaval and the Soviet Union was sliding towards the great famine of 1931-33.

Thus the tsarist “drunkards’ budget” was revived in the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Vodka revenues rapidly grew in importance. According to data compiled by Julie Hessler, in 1933 Glavspirt, the state alcohol monopoly, recorded profits of 6.5 billion roubles, equivalent to approximately 18.5 per cent of the total state budget. That same year, the authorities aimed to raise an additional 500 million roubles from vodka sales.[****]

Thus the tsarist “drunkards’ budget” had been revived in the hands of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

On the one hand, the state was siphoning off a portion of workers’ and peasants’ purchasing power into the budget through the sale of high-priced alcohol; on the other, it was creating the conditions for the increasingly severe effects of alcohol on workers’ health, family life, labour productivity and the social fabric.

The measure Stalin had described as “temporary” became a permanent feature of Soviet state finances.

“Commodity Number One”

Some fifty years later, this historical continuity would be brought into sharp relief by Mikhail Baytalsky, a former supporter of the Left Opposition.

Mikhail Baytalsky

Arrested three times by the Stalinist regime and subjected to years of imprisonment, exile and labour camps, Baytalsky survived the Stalin era. In the 1970s, his study Commodity Number One, written under the pseudonym A. Krasikov, circulated as samizdat. In it, he sought to reconstruct alcohol data that the Soviet authorities no longer published by drawing on different categories of official statistics.

According to his calculations, Soviet citizens spent 23.2 billion roubles on alcoholic beverages in 1970. This accounted for roughly 15 per cent of all retail spending in state and co-operative shops and 27 per cent of spending on food.

Alcohol had become the Soviet consumer economy’s “Commodity Number One”.

But Baytalsky’s central conclusion was harsher still. In his view, “Commodity Number One” was also on its way to becoming “Calamity Number One”.

After recalling that Stalin had defended the vodka monopoly in 1927 as a “temporary expedient” for securing the resources needed for industrialisation, Baytalsky summed up the outcome of nearly half a century of experience in a single sentence:

“The temporary expedient had turned into a permanent calamity.”[*****]

These words are crucial to understanding the situation that had emerged by 1985.

When Gorbachev, Ligachev and other Soviet leaders declared war on alcoholism, they were undoubtedly confronting a real and extremely grave social problem. Yet the problem they were fighting was not simply inherited from the tsarist past or from the cultural traditions of Russian society.

The bureaucratic regime over which they themselves presided had, over decades, made alcohol sales one of the principal sources of state revenue.

Moreover, while the official historical narrative of the 1985 campaign invoked Lenin and the prohibitions of 1919, it made no mention of the views of Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the United Opposition, all of whom had fought against the restoration of the vodka monopoly in the 1920s. Stalinist historiography had also erased this struggle from the historical memory of Soviet society.

From 1923 onwards, the warnings had been unequivocal: tying the state budget to the alcohol consumption of the working masses would erode workers’ real incomes, undermine social and cultural development, damage industry and create an increasingly difficult-to-resolve contradiction between the state’s professed commitment to combating alcoholism and its own fiscal interests.

The following sixty years more than vindicated these warnings.

As bureaucratic degeneration became increasingly evident in 1923-24, the objections of Trotsky and of the cadres who would later form the Left Opposition to the restoration of the vodka monopoly were overridden. In 1925, as “socialism in one country”, breaking with the perspective of world revolution, became the dominant programme of the Stalinist centre, the state monopoly on vodka was restored almost simultaneously. Amid the upheavals of forced collectivisation and the mounting crisis that would culminate in the great famine, Stalin demanded that vodka production be increased to the maximum. Over the following decades, alcohol revenues became a component of Soviet state finances that was increasingly difficult to dispense with.

This ominous historical chain reveals with striking clarity an important aspect of the fiscal and class logic of the programme of “socialism in one country”.

In 1985, when the leaders who were heirs to the same bureaucratic regime declared a war on alcoholism that amounted to a form of partial prohibition, they were in fact confronting a problem that had been fostered and aggravated over decades by the fiscal and social policies of that very regime.

[*] Helena Stone, “The Soviet Government and Moonshine, 1917–1929”, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique, vol. 27, nos. 3–4 (1986), pp. 359–361; Leon Trotsky, “Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema”, in Problems of Daily Life and Other Writings on Culture & Science, Monad Press, 1973, p. 31.

[**] Vadim Z. Rogovin, Was There an Alternative? 1923–1927, Mehring Books, 2021, pp. 167–169, 178; Leon Trotsky, “October 8, 1923 Letter from Leon Trotsky to the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission”, 8 October 1923.

[***] Rogovin, Was There an Alternative? 1923–1927, pp. 454–456; J. V. Stalin, “The Fourteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.): Political Report of the Central Committee”, 18 December 1925; Leon Trotsky et al., The Platform of the Joint Opposition, 1927, Section 4.

[****] Julie Hessler, A Social History of Soviet Trade, Princeton University Press, 2004; Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov and Oleg V. Khlevniuk (eds.), Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936, Yale University Press, 1995, p. 209; Vadim Z. Rogovin, Bolsheviks Against Stalinism, 1928–1933, Mehring Books, 2019, p. 507.

[*****] A. Krasikov [Mikhail Baytalsky], “Commodity Number One”, in Roy Medvedev (ed.), The Samizdat Register I–II, W. W. Norton, 1977 and 1981. For Baytalsky’s life, see also Mikhail Baitalsky, Notebooks for the Grandchildren, trans. Marilyn Vogt-Downey, Brill, 2025.

Concluded