1/20/2024 0 Comments Japanese vodkaRead more: ‘You’re Not a Person if You Don’t Drink.’ How This Tiny European Country Developed the World’s Worst Drinking Problem Prohibition exacerbated each.įorcing poor Russians to quit cold turkey amid the horrors of war likely didn’t enamor the peasant, worker or soldier to the tsar. In addition to Russia’s disastrous losses on the war front, historians generally point to three factors that brought down the Russian empire: discontent with the tsar, hyperinflation and the breakdown of Russia’s transportation infrastructure. Mutineers stopped his train and forced the tsar’s abdication in favor of an ill-fated Provisional Government. In the February Revolution of 1917, the tsar was returning from the front to address an insurrection that was roiling his capital of Petrograd. It was a decision that would hasten the end of the Romanov Empire itself. Ultimately, this proclamation of Russia as the world’s first prohibition country was little more than Nicholas’ consolation to his temperate uncle who grieved the loss of his beloved son. Tsar Nicholas‘ prohibition telegram to Konstantin-“abolishing forever the government sale of vodka in Russia”-was dated the following day. 27, 1914, making him the only Romanov to die in battle in World War I. The Grand Duke rushed to Vilnius to be by his dying son’s bedside, but was too late. In pursuing retreating German forces in Lithuania in September 1914, Prince Oleg was shot through the right hip-a wound that quickly became infected. One of Russia’s ten million troops was 22-year-old platoon commander Prince Oleg Konstantinovich Romanov, son of the temperate Grand Duke Konstantin. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter In January 1914, Nicholas appointed as minister of finance Sir Peter Bark, with the charge of making the treasury no longer “dependent on the ruination of the spiritual and economic forces of the majority of My faithful subjects.” It was an unenviable task to wean the mighty empire off of its greatest source of revenue, even before the added expense of assembling the largest fighting force in world history later that year. The time has come to lock up the Tsar’s saloons.” Even the notoriously drunken and debauching Siberian mystic Grigory Rasputin argued: “It is unbefitting for a Tsar to deal in vodka and make drunkards out of honest people. Members of the royal family-including the tsar’s rather bohemian favorite uncle, the aforementioned Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov-began patronizing temperance. The once heavy-drinking Tsar Nicholas II had increasingly been won to the temperance cause. At the disastrous defeat at Mukden, Russian newspapers described how, “the Japanese found several thousand Russian soldiers so dead drunk they were able to bayonet them like so many pigs.” At mobilization points across Russia, the call-up of peasant conscripts often turned into drunken and murderous riots. What the Russians thought would be a quick victory against a non-European foe quickly turned into an embarrassing debacle. In 1904, the Japanese attacked Russia’s Far-Eastern outpost at Port Arthur, beginning the Russo-Japanese War. Consequently, any temperance movement to promote the health and well-being of the peasantry was quickly snuffed out, lest the tsar’s revenues be diminished. No less than one-third of all state revenue of the mighty Russian empire came from selling vodka to its own people. For centuries, going back to Ivan the Terrible, the tsarist government maintained an incredibly lucrative monopoly on the vodka trade. To understand Russian prohibition, context matters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |