fits of moderate wine consumption. Individuals have made a
few ethnographic studies of drinking and its meanings
among various local populations in different countries, and
Brazil is beginning to produce some interesting physiological
and psychological data. The recently organized Latin American Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism is an informal network of colleagues at various institutions, most of
whom work independently.
Producers and Distributors
The beverage-alcohol trade is one in which many companies
deal with more than a single class of beverage, for example, producing wine or beer and simultaneously distributing distilled
spirits that were produced elsewhere. It is also a business in
which actors come and go with some frequency, although this
tends to be less the case in South America than in Europe or
North America. Because of licensing agreements, mergers, and
other arrangements, it is not always clear whether a company is
indigenous to the country or acting as an agent for a larger international organization. That said, some of the major producers and distributors in the region at the beginning of 2002 were
the following (listed alphabetically by country, and within that,
grouped in the four beverage categories: wine, beer, spirits, and
various).
In Argentina, wine is produced and distributed largely by Valentín Bianchi, SACIF, Bodegas Chandon, S.A., and Bodegas
Trapiche, SAICA; spirits by Erven Lucas Bols, S.A.; and a variety
of beverages by Companía International de Bebidas y Alimentos, S.A., Finca Flinchman, S.A., Hiram Walker, S.A., Peñaflor,
S.A., and Seagram de Argentina, S.A. In Brazil, spirits are produced and distributed by Bols do Brasil Ltda, Hiram Walker
Brasil Commerçio e Industria Ltda, and Industria de Bebidas
Joaquim Thomaz de Aquino Filho, S.A.; a variety of beverages
by Bacardi Martini do Brasil, Brasif Comercial Exportaçao e Importaçao Ltda, Franco-Suissa Importaçao, Exportaçao e Representaçoes Ltda, Heublein do Brasil, Indústrias Müller de Bebidas Ltda, Rémy Lacave do Brasil, and Seagram do Brasil
Industria e Comercio Ltda.
In Chile, wine is a major agricultural product and export is
handled largely by José Canepa y Cia Ltda, Viña Carta Vieja,
S.A., Viña Cousiño-Macul, Cooperativa Agrícola Vitivinícola
Curico Ltda, Discover Wine, S.A.,Agrícola Viña Los Vascos, S.A.,
Viña Manquehue Ltda, Domaine Oriental, Viña Santa Inés, and
Sociedad Anónima Viña Santa Rita. Companies that handle various beverages include Casa Lapostolle, S.A., Viña Concha y
Toro, Viña Erráxuriz, S.A., Martini and Rossi, SAIC, Viña San
Pedro, S.A., and Seagram de Chile.
In Colombia, the company for beers is Cervecería Unión,
S.A.; that for spirits, Constain Ltda; others dealing in various
beverages include Pedro Domeq Colombia, S.A., International
Distillers Colombia, S.A., and Puyana y Cia de Bogotá, S.A. In
Panama, spirits are handled largely by Bacardi Centroamérica,
S.A. In Peru, most spirits are handled by United Distillers G&R
del Perú. In Uruguay, Gilbey, S.A. dominates the spirits market.
In Venezuela, beers are handled largely by Brahma Venezuela
and Cervecería Polar, C.A.; spirits by Ron Santa Teresa, C.A.; and
various beverages by Seagram de Venezuela, C.A., and by United
Distillers de Venezuela, C.A.
Dwight B. Heath
See also: Anthropological Theories of Drinking and Temperance;
Colonization, European, and Drinking Behavior among
Indigenous Peoples (Portuguese America); Native Americans:
Drinking Patterns and Temperance Reform; Rum; World Health
Organization (WHO)
References
Acta Psiquiátrica y Psicológica de America latina. Special issue on
alcohol in Latin America. 20, no. 2 (1974).
Heath, Dwight B. Drinking Occasions: Comparative Perspectives on
Alcohol and Culture. Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazell, 2000.
———, ed. International Handbook on Alcohol and Culture.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Horwitz, José, Juan Marconi, and Gonzalo Adis Castro. Bases para
una epidemiología del alcoholismo en América latina.
Monografía de Acta Psiquiátrica y Psicológica de América
latina 1. Buenos Aires: Fondo para la Salud Mental, 1967.
Institute of Medicine. Legislative Approaches to Prevention of
Alcohol-Related Problems: An Inter-American Workshop.
Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1982.
Marshall, Mac, ed. Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages: A
Cross-Cultural Survey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1979.
Soviet Union and Russia since 1917,
Alcohol and Temperance in
The control or prohibition of alcohol consumption has been a
central feature of social reform in the Soviet Union and Russia
throughout the twentieth century. The government formally instituted prohibition from 1914 to 1925, yet the population
found ways to distill illicit alcohol. During World War I
(1914–1917), the October Revolution (1917), and the Russian
Civil War (1918–1921), drunkenness among the lower classes
reached epidemic proportions. In the 1920s, the state repealed
prohibition, revived a state monopoly on the production and
sale of alcohol, and sponsored a nationwide temperance campaign that lasted into the 1930s. Every Soviet leader since
Joseph Stalin has, in some fashion, tried to maximize liquor revenues while simultaneously reducing the incidence of alcohol
abuse among the population.
Historically, Russian socialist parties had a strong temperance tradition, especially since the prerevolutionary drink trade
was in the hands of the tsarist government itself.When the Bolsheviks came to power as a result of the October Revolution of
1917, they extended the prohibition measures that had been introduced as part of the mobilization in 1914. On 28 November
1917, the new government closed all remaining wine and spirits factories and prohibited the production or sale of alcoholic
SOVIET UNION AND RUSSIA SINCE 1917, ALCOHOL AND TEMPERANCE IN
579
beverages. Within a month, the state established a Commissariat for the Struggle Against Alcoholism and Gambling, with
representatives in major cities and the provinces, followed by
the nationalization of all existing stocks of alcohol in late 1918.
These measures triggered violent battles between drinkers
and antialcohol brigades and led to the development of a thriving trade in illegal spirits. According to some estimates, at least
one-third of all rural households were engaged in distilling
grain alcohol for sale on the black market in the early 1920s. In
1922 alone, there were more than 500,000 prosecutions in the
Russian Republic for brewing or selling moonshine. As the
courts began to collapse under the strain and the jails filled with
poor peasants, the problems associated with prohibition intensified: declining state revenues, dwindling grain supplies, and
no control over the trade in spirits. Because prohibition and the
war had sharply curtailed alcohol revenues, many Soviet authorities saw an end to prohibition as a means for the fledgling
state to attain financial solvency and gain a measure of control
over illegal brewing. (In 1913, the population consumed nearly
340 million U.S. gallons of state-produced vodka yielding just
over 953 million rubles, or 26 percent of total state revenues.)
The idea of the new socialist state producing and selling alcohol
for any reason, however, sparked heated debate among Communist Party leaders. In the end, financial considerations prevailed. In August 1921 the government legalized the sale of all
wines, and six months later it legalized the sale of beer. In January 1923 the state legalized the production and sale of 40-proof
liquor, and by 1 October 1925, it began making and selling 80proof vodka, marking the end of prohibition and the reintroduction of the state liquor monopoly.
The Society for the Struggle against
Alcoholism
The end of prohibition was met by a wave of drunkenness that
engulfed the entire country. In an attempt to curb public drunkenness, state officials launched a nationwide temperance campaign. Led by Yuri Larin, the country’s most renowned economist, on 16 February 1928 a group of concerned politicians and
medical professionals met in Moscow to organize the first Soviet temperance society, the Society for the Struggle Against Alcoholism (Obshchestvo po bor’be s alkogolizmom [OBSA]). At
the first meeting, Larin, by way of justifying state sale of vodka,
explained that alcoholism was caused by social conditions and
not by the availability of vodka. He urged careful examination of
society as a whole in order to find ways to improve the country’s
material and cultural growth.
The first official task on OBSA’s agenda was to enlist the help
of various state agencies to adopt legislation limiting the production and sale of alcohol, controlling its consumption, and
enforcing new legislation. OBSA’s second task was to initiate a
massive propaganda campaign aimed at swaying public opinion against drinking. Within the first five months of its existence, OBSA organized 2,000 mass meetings, lectures, and exhi580
bitions attended by nearly 150,000 people. The society began to
publish a monthly journal, Trezvost’ i kul’tura (Sobriety and Culture), from July 1928 in which the bulk of its propaganda appeared. The most obvious feature of OBSA’s propaganda was the
extremism in definitions of alcoholism and calls for sobriety.
According to OBSA literature, drinking necessarily led to alcoholism and alcoholism necessarily led to criminality, insanity,
death, murder, mayhem, and disease. Displaying pictures of livers that resembled Jerusalem artichokes and swollen, blackened
hearts, many of OBSA’s journals and books detailed the physical
horrors that awaited one in taking a few drinks.
OBSA membership consisted primarily of male workers who
were required to practice total abstinence. A worker who still
drank could be a “candidate” member until he or she gave up
drink altogether. The first OBSA cell was organized in late 1928
at the Moscow factory Serp and Molot and immediately began
a campaign under the slogan “The Unified Front in the Struggle
against Alcohol and Tobacco.” In early 1929, OBSA boasted over
250,000 members in more than 200 factory cells, thereby declaring itself a genuinely proletarian movement. In May that
same year, OBSA’s founding board organized the All-Union
Council of Anti-Alcohol Societies (Vsesoiuznyi sovet protivalkogol’nykh obshchestv SSSR [VSPO]) to coordinate the various branches’ activities. More than 100 delegates from factories
as far away as Ukraine, Belorussia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan attended the first session, held in Moscow. Within the
year, VSPO organized more than 100 antialcohol demonstrations in different towns and some 50 local workers’ conferences
on how to struggle against alcoholism.
At the beginning of the 1930s, official policies changed and
OBSA was given instructions to shift its focus from narrow antialcohol work to an all-out struggle for improvements in the
conditions of everyday life. The temperance journal Trezvost’ i
kul’tura explained to its readers that the temperance movement
had been misdirected—socialism and the socialist way of life
would cure drunkenness. In keeping with this shift, the following month the journal changed its name to Kul’tura i byt (Culture and Everyday Life). In March 1931, OBSA officially changed
its name to the Society for Healthy Living and ceased all antialcohol agitation and propaganda.
Alcohol and the Stalinist State
OBSA’s close ties with state and party administrations had
made it vulnerable to changes and shifts in politics and policy.
By 1930, the Stalinist state had abandoned the quest for a sober
society in the interests of financial expediency. Convinced that
the Soviet Union needed liquor revenues to survive, Stalin directed factories to increase alcohol production and aim for
maximum output. In 1933, he reversed the state’s previous calls
for the creation of a sober working class and encouraged workers to reward themselves for a job well done with a “little glass
of champagne.” Within a few months, discussion of workers’
drunkenness in the press, which had occupied a central place in
SOVIET UNION AND RUSSIA SINCE 1917, ALCOHOL AND TEMPERANCE IN
public and official discourse on creating a new socialist society,
ceased. A large and vital temperance movement fell silent, all
factory cells of the successor to OBSA were dissolved, and their
leaders purged. In the ensuing years, the central government
built more factories without taking measures to control the
drinking of the increasing numbers of factory workers, and by
1940 the Soviet Union had more liquor stores than shops selling
meat, fruits, and vegetables combined.
Because of the culture of secrecy that permeated the Soviet
state as a legacy of the Stalinist era, it is nearly impossible to
discern with any accuracy the amount of alcohol produced or
consumed in the Soviet Union from the 1940s into the 1980s.
Beginning in 1963, the state stopped publishing figures on alcohol output and obscured or altered statistics concerning sales of
alcoholic beverages. Similarly, from the 1930s no serious studies of the social, economic, or legal issues related to abusive
drinking were conducted and the subject of alcohol completely
vanished from the press. Despite the paucity of information,
one Western study found that alcohol consumption rose
steadily from the 1950s: Annual per capita consumption of hard
liquor (excluding beer and wines) was estimated at 7.3 liters
(1.9 U.S. gallons) of liquor in 1955, rising to 15.2 liters (4 U.S.
gallons) in 1979. Actual consumption levels were probably
much higher, however, since the study did not adjust for differences owing to gender, age, ethnicity, or location. Alcohol revenues in the 1960s and 1970s accounted for more than onethird of all state revenues and one-ninth of the entire state
budget. By the early 1970s, taxes collected from alcohol sales exceeded the officially declared defense budget.
Perhaps in response to high levels of alcohol consumption,
each successive leader after Stalin introduced some type of temperance campaign. In December 1958, under Nikita
Khrushchev, leader of the Communist Party from 1953 to 1964,
top party and state organs called for a determined struggle
against alcoholism and other survivals of the capitalist past.
This campaign mainly took the form of propaganda and education, but the state placed some restrictions on the sale of alcohol in shops and restaurants and strengthened laws against
home brewing. In 1960, the criminal code provided for compulsory therapy along with harsh sentences for those arrested for
drunkenness more than once. Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary from 1964 to 1982, himself a notorious drinker, furthered
Customers at the counter in a liquor store in Moscow, Russia, ca. 1950 (Hulton/Archive)
SOVIET UNION AND RUSSIA SINCE 1917, ALCOHOL AND TEMPERANCE IN
581
efforts to control alcohol abuse. In 1966, a series of fines for
public intoxication was introduced, followed the next year by
the establishment of a network of labor rehabilitation centers
(lechebno-trudovye profilaktorii, LTPs) that provided compulsory treatment and labor reeducation of problem drinkers.
Amounting to little more than squalid jails for drunkards, the
LTP system was extended in the 1970s. Despite repeated calls
from the Brezhnev administration for a more determined
struggle against alcoholism, state alcohol output increased, per
capita consumption rose, and most officials deemed the alcohol
problem insurmountable.
The brief period between Brezhnev’s death in 1982 and the
accession of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 was marked by a determined effort to strengthen public order and morality under Yuri
Andropov (1982–1984) and Konstantin Chernenko (1984–
1985). An attempt to reduce alcohol abuse was a central part of
this campaign. In 1983, Andropov introduced new penalties for
drinking at the workplace. His successor, Chernenko, expressed
concern over the failure of earlier campaigns to effect changes
in the population’s drinking habits and began to make plans for
a national antialcohol movement. There was even discussion of
Poster from Gorbachev’s 1985 alcohol suppression program. Official
toasts were to be made with juice, but the program failed because
drinkers consumed homemade alcohol. (Shepard Sherbell/Corbis
SABA)
582
total prohibition and the creation of a national temperance society. He died, however, before implementing any of these plans.
The Anti-Alcohol Campaign of the
Gorbachev Era
Upon succession as leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail
Gorbachev took up the issue of alcoholism as the first public
priority of his administration. To that end, the state and party
issued a series of decrees restricting the amount of alcohol that
could be bought, the hours it could be sold, and the places it
could be drunk. State production of vodka and wines was cut
by more than 50 percent, from 29.5 million liters (7.79 million
U.S. gallons) of vodka in 1980 to 14.2 million liters (3.75 million U.S. gallons) in 1988, and from 32.3 million liters (8.53
million U.S. gallons) of wine in 1980 to 17.9 million in 1988. In
September 1985, officials established an All-Union Voluntary
Society for the Struggle for Temperance, modeled after the earlier temperance society, to promote sobriety throughout the
USSR. By May 1986, the society claimed 350,000 branches and
more than 11 million individual members. That same year, the
society revived publication of the journal Trezvost’ i kul’tura,
with more than 600,000 subscribers.
The results of the campaign were disastrous: Sugar, used in
the production of moonshine, disappeared from the shelves as
bootlegging became epidemic; the government lost nearly 2 billion rubles in revenues; and the population became angered by
the abrupt unavailability of alcohol. Within three years, Gorbachev retreated from his antialcohol policy, but it took nearly
four years for the government to recover lost revenues. Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest the campaign had any effect on the level of alcohol consumption. By 1993, Russia was
ranked ahead of France as the world’s heaviest drinking nation.
Kate Transchel
See also: Alcohol, Consumption of (Russia); Russia, Imperial,
Temperance in; Vodka
References
Philips, Laura. The Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker
Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900–1929. DeKalb: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2000.
Simpura, Jussi, and Boris M. Levin, eds. Demystifying Russian
Drinking: Comparative Studies from the 1990s. Helsinki:
Stakes, 1997.
Stone, Helena.“The Soviet Government and Moonshine,
1917–1929” in Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique. 27
(July–December 1986): 359–379.
Transchel, Kate.“Liquid Assets: Vodka and Drinking in Early
Soviet Factories” in The Human Tradition in Modern Russia,
edited by William Husband. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly
Resources, 2000.
———.“Staggering towards Socialism: The Soviet Anti-Alcohol
Campaign, 1928–1932” in The Soviet and Post Soviet Review.
23, no. 2 (1998): 191–202.
Treml, V. Alcohol in the USSR. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1982.
SOVIET UNION AND RUSSIA SINCE 1917, ALCOHOL AND TEMPERANCE IN