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Abstract
The problem of drink and the consumption of alcohol, especially vodka, and its consequences in prerevolutionary and Soviet Russia have been well documented. Furthermore, historians of Russia have also analyzed the role of posters as a form of propaganda or as a means of generating support for the policies of the Soviet state. However, with the exception of Laura Bernstein and Tricia Starks, very few specialists on the Soviet era have explored the link between the two. This article aims to fill the gap by using visual illustrations to analyze the anti-alcohol health text and messages in Soviet posters from the 1920s to the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The issues explored include: the historical context and other factors and how they shaped the content of the posters; the way posters were employed by the Ministry of Public Health and Soviet leadership to create a new way of life (novyi byt); how far and in what way these posters are a sign of the key health problems highlighted by the Soviet state and medical profession; and the types of appeal made. Finally, a critical assessment will be undertaken of the impact and effectiveness of these posters as part of a broader campaign of Soviet health promotion in relation to drink and alcoholism in Soviet Russia.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to express his thanks to the British Academy for funding part of this research under a project on the politics of welfare under Lenin and Stalin, to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the United States National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, for permission to use images from their collections and to Yuri Matrosovich for use of images from the online Museum of Anti-Alcohol Posters (http://www.tululuka.net/alco/alko04.pxml) in this article. He is also grateful to the special issue editor and journal editor for their constructive feedback on his work. Russian language advice and assistance provided by William Brumfield and Maya Gervitz is additionally acknowledged.
Notes
Cited in Walter D. Connor, Deviance in Soviet Society: Crime, Delinquency, and Alcoholism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 39–40.
See David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Boris M. Segal, The Drunken Society: Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the Soviet Union (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990), and R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Statisticheskii spravochnik po Leningradu 1930g (Leningrad, 1930), 36.
See Kate Transchel, Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1805–1932 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
Nikolai A. Semashko, Health Protection in the USSR (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934), 115.
Christopher Williams, “Old Habits Die Hard: Alcoholism in Leningrad under NEP and Some Lessons for the Gorbachev Administration,” Irish Slavonic Studies 12 (1991): 69–96.
A. G. Parkhomenko, “Gosudarstvenno-pravovye meropriyatiia po borbe s'pianstvom i pervye Sovetskoi vlasi,” Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i pravo 4 (April 1984): 112–16.
See Williams, “Old Habits Die Hard,” 69–96.
Laura Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), 24. On the role of this society, see T. P. Korzhikhina, “Bor'ba s alkogolizm v 1920-e nachale 1930-kh godov,” Voprosy Istorii 9 (September 1985): 20–33.
Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 26.
Stephen White, Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33.
Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 366–69.
Christopher Read, “Values, Substitutes and Institutions: The Cultural Dimension of the Bolshevik Dictatorship,” in The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and Civil Wars, ed. Vladimir N. Brovkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 30–35.
Read, “Values,” 306.
Read, “Values,” 310–12.
Semashko, Health Protection in the USSR, 115–17. In , a poster commissioned by Narkomzdrav and printed in Kiev, alcoholism could be overcome in the following ways: “Pioneers! Teach parents not to drink (alcohol)”; Teachers! Explain to children the harm of (heavy) drinking”; “Young people! Exercise and you will not want to drink (alcohol)”; Women! Speak up against (heavy) drinking and drunkards”; Visit the cinema and theater—It is a reasonable entertainment”; Spend free time in a club and in a village house (a sel'skij budynok abbreviated as sel'bud, which served as an education center in the Ukrainian village)”; Play chess and checkers—Such a rest is healthy.”
N. I. Baburina, ed., Sovetskii politicheskii plakat: Iz kollektsii Gosudarsvennoi biblioteki SSSR imeni V. I. Lenina (Moscow: Soviet khudozhnik,1984); N. I. Baburina, ed., The Soviet Political Poster, 1917–80 from the USSR Lenin Library Collection (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985); Bonnell, Iconography of Power; Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods in Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1985); Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).
Vyateslav Polonskii, Russkii revoluitsionnyi plakat (Moscow 1925), 75. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. On his career see White, The Bolshevik Poster, 40–41.
White, The Bolshevik Poster, 18
See Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 343.
Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 353–54.
David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 1–3.
Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 5.
Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 6, 9–10.
Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 10, 13.
Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 16.
Laura Bernstein, “The Politics of Gender in Sexual Enlightenment Posters of the 1920s,” Russian Review 57, no. 2 (April 1998): 191.
Bernstein, “The Politics of Gender,” 193.
On Deni's career see White, The Bolshevik Poster, 56–61.
Bernstein, “The Politics of Gender,” 198.
Bernstein, “The Politics of Gender,” 198–99.
On color symbolism in posters, see Ulf Abel, “Icons and Soviet Art,” in Symbols of Power: The Esthetics of Political Legitimation in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Claes Arvidsson and Lars Erik Blomqvist, eds. (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1987), 150–57; and Richard Stites, “Russian Symbols, Nation, People, Ideas,” in National Symbolism, Fractured Identities: Contesting the National Narrative, ed. Michael E. Geisler (Lebanon, Middlebury College Press, 2005), 101–17.
Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 363.
Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 364.
Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 34–35.
Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 35.
Tricia Starks, The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene and the Revolutionary State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
Bernstein, “The Politics of Gender,” 215.
Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 31.
Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 32.
Phillips, Bolsheviks and the Bottle, 31.
Susan E. Read, “All Stalin's Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art in the 1930s,” Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 136.
Transchel, Under the Influence, 117.
Pravda, October 28, 1974, 1.
S. G. Strumilin and M. Ya. Sonin, “Alkogol'nye poteri bor'ba s nimi,” Ekonomika i organizatsiya promyshlennogo proizvodstva 4 (1974): 44.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 44. For detailed discussion, see Christopher Williams, “The Political Economy of Health in the USSR,” (MSc [Econ] thesis, University of Wales, 1985), chap. 2.
Williams, “Old Habits Die Hard”; White, Russia Goes Dry; Therese C. Reitan, “The Operation Failed but the Patient Survived: Varying Assessments of the Soviet Union's Last Anti-Alcohol Campaign,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 34 (2001): 241–60.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 70.
White's Russia Goes Dry contains several useful examples.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 77.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 78, 80.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 105.
Cited in White, Russia Goes Dry, 118.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 148.
On this, see Vladimir G. Treml, “Alcohol in the USSR: A Fiscal Dilemma,” Soviet Studies 27, no. 2 (April 1975): 169–71; and Vladimir G. Treml, Alcohol in the USSR: A Statistical Study (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), 33.
Marya Levintova, “Russian Alcohol Policy in the Making,” Alcohol and Alcoholism 42, no. 5 (2007): 503.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 182–89.
White, Russia Goes Dry, 189.
Connor, Deviance in Soviet Society, 582–83.
See Christopher Williams, “Sex Education and the AIDS Epidemic in the Former Soviet Union,” Sociology of Health and Illness 16, no. 1 (January 1994): 81–102.
Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State.
Transchel, Under the Influence, 101.
Transchel, Under the Influence, 121.
On this, see Susan Gross Solomon, “David and Goliath in Soviet Public Health: The Rivalry of Social Hygienists and Psychiatrists over the Bytovoi Alcoholic,” Soviet Studies XLI (April 1989): 254–75; and Susan Gross Solomon, “The Limits of Government Patronage of Sciences: Social Hygiene and the Soviet State, 1920–1930,” Social History of Medicine 3, no. 3 (1990): 405–35.
Starks, The Body Soviet, 5.
Starks, The Body Soviet, 187.
Starks, The Body Soviet, 210.
See Alexandra V. Lysova and William Alex Pridemore, “Dramatic Problems and Weak Policy: Trends in Alcohol Consumption, Harms and Policy: Russia, 1990–2010,” Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 27 (2010): 425–47.
Transchel, Under the Influence, 104.
Matthias Neumann, “Revolutionizing Mind and Soul? Soviet Youth and Cultural Campaigns during the New Economic Policy (1921–8),” Social History 33, no. 3, (2008): 264.
Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 50.
Hoffmann, Stalinist Values, 44.
Ekaterina V. Haskins and James P. Zappen, “‘Totalitarian Visual Monologue’: Reading Soviet Posters with Bakhtin,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010): 341.