Kate Transchel Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932. University of Pittsburgh Press Pittsburgh, PA 2006. X. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. ISBN: 0-8229-4278-X

Kate Transchel Under the Influence: Working-Class Drinking, Temperance, and Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1895–1932. University of Pittsburgh Press Pittsburgh, PA 2006. X, 209 S. = Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. ISBN: 0-8229-4278-X.

Kate Transchel’s “Under the Influence”, which examines working-class and peasant drinking habits before and after the October Revolution as well as tsarist and Soviet attempts to change those habits, is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the place of alcohol in Russia’s history. Based on extensive research in national and local archives as well as on numerous published sources, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of how the strength of traditional drinking habits resisted the efforts of bourgeois and Bolshevik reformers to transform working-class culture.

Transchel begins by discussing the evolution of Russian drinking culture in the pre-revolutionary period and the growth of the temperance movement. For male and female peasants excessive drinking was a communal ritual and a traditional part of the social life. Yet although church holidays and other special occasions were marked by binges that might go on for days, vodka was not a part of everyday life for most peasants. The growth of the cash economy, urbanization, and industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century changed traditional drinking patterns and regular drinking became an important feature of working-class male sociability both in the taverns and the workplace. Male workers’ drinking customs served to distinguish workers from non-workers and excluded female workers. Beginning in the 1890s middle-class reformers sought to combat drunkenness by enticing workers away from the bottle with “rational recreations” such as theatre, reading, and choral singing. Medical specialists, focusing on chronic alcoholism rather than occasional drunkenness, regarded it as a disease but could not agree on alcoholism’s causes or cures. When they thought about it at all, socialists saw alcoholism as a result of capitalism’s economic exploitation of the working class. The tsarist government had an ambivalent attitude to alcohol consumption – on the one hand the state gave subsidies to temperance activities, but on the other hand it derived a significant portion of its revenues from its monopoly on the sale and distribution of spirits.

At the outbreak of World War I the government introduced prohibition, in 1917 the Provisional Government made the ban permanent, and when the Bolsheviks took power in October they continued to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks. Prohibition had two main effects. First, the state lost significant tax revenues. Second, the illegal brewing of hard spirits became an important cottage industry and source of income for large numbers of peasants, particularly women. The Bolsheviks, determined to build a new, sober socialist society and culture, battled drunkenness and bootleggers during the Civil War but financial considerations eventually prevailed, and with the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 prohibition began to be gradually repealed. In 1925 the state liquor monopoly was reinstated and the revolutionary state became reliant on the income generated by the population’s consumption of alcohol. The Bolsheviks did not, however, abandon their campaign against alcohol. The nature of this campaign was influenced by the rivalry between psychiatrists, who viewed alcoholism as a mental illness that required medical treatment, and social hygienists, who saw it as a result of poverty and ignorance that could be eradicated through education and propaganda. By the end of the 1920s, as Russia embarked on the construction of socialism through collectivization and the 5-year plans, the psychiatrists won out and alcoholism was defined as an individual rather than a social problem. The drunk became an enemy of socialism and the Soviet state, and in the 1930s the regime turned to coercion to control alcohol consumption.

Neither propaganda nor coercion had much effect on working-class drinking culture. Transchel convincingly argues that “workers collectively and as individuals resisted the behavioural norms officials sought to impose on them, relying instead on older, more fundamental cultural traditions” (p. 99). She provides many examples of continuities between pre-revolutionary and Soviet drinking practices among the industrial workforce, and finds evidence that “drinking simultaneously deepened the fracture lines within the working class, strengthened solidarities among various social groups, and was a symbolic affirmation of domination and power” (p. 124). In the end, the regime had to accept that it could not eradicate working-class drinking habits, and to call a halt to its war on alcohol. At any rate, the state needed the revenue from alcohol sales to finance industrialization, and production of vodka and other spirits nearly doubled during the 1930s. Alcoholism was simply written out of the Stalinist script – since socialism had been achieved, Soviet workers were deemed to suffer no longer from alcoholism.

Drawing on evidence from Moscow, Khar’kov, Tomsk, and Saratov, Transchel expands on Laura Phillips’s 2000 study, “Bolsheviks and the Bottle”, which focuses on St. Petersburg workers. While Phillips argues that drinking on the shop floor disappeared in the 1920s, Transchel finds no evidence of this. Of course, different patterns of workplace drinking may have occurred in different places – the issue merits further investigation. Of particular interest is the discussion of how drinking customs functioned to highlight divisions between veteran workers and newcomers from the countryside, which contributes to the long-standing debate about the proletarian and peasant characteristics of the Russian working class.

“Under the Influence” is an insightful, well-written, and thoroughly researched account of how tenacious and enduring traditional practices thwarted the Soviet state’s attempts to transform everyday life. It deserves a wide readership among students and specialists alike.

Anthony Swift, Colchester