VODKA: COMMODITY NUMBER ONE
Krasikov, A.
From ancient times, wine has added pleasure and animation to talk between friends. In those countries where vines are cultivated, in the homeland of wine, people did not gulp it down....
...This means that alcohol accounted for almost 15 percent of total purchases: and if we make the comparison with foodstuffs alone, it accounted for 27 percent of that total...
...By calculating what this meant in rubles and deducting it from the new, post-1963 combined total for "other foodstuffs," we recover the figure formerly given for "alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages," which has been so clumsily hidden up the editor's sleeve...
...And, something even more difficult just you prove that the quantity of material loss inflicted by drunkenness is greater than the material revenue obtained from the sale of vodka...
...Having obtained yet another proof that we were correct in our calculation of the figure for purchases in 1970, we can now confidently compare the sale of alcohol with the sales of other commodities for which the yearbook gives direct figures...
...He went out to celebrate and came back home to mourn...
...The average size of deposit ranges from 519 rubles in Kirghizia to 588 rubles in Byelorussia...
...But what about rates of increase...
...When he left the Ministry of Finance, however, the line that he had followed was, he wrote, abruptly changed, and the Ministry now saw the function of the monopoly not as struggle against alcoholism but as increasing revenue from the sale of drink...
...And yet, despite such effective measures, consumption of alcohol during a ten-year period increased (according to the official evidence of the table, already quoted more than once, "Dynamic of the Sales of Commodities," page 558) 2.2 fold, that is, by 120 percent, or, when reckoned per head of population, by 100 percent...
...Let us see what goes to make up the cost of production of vodka and its price nowadays...
...and in those where they let rooms and sleeping accommodation to summer vacationers...
...The only difference is that everybody knows the former, but not the latter...
...The fact that this price can be raised so simply and easily to any height required tells us that there is no relation at all...
...The table lists 25 different groups of commodities...
...This means an increase of nearly 50 percent in eight years, since in 1962 the amount produced was 162 million decaliters...
...The general picture is that the annual output of soft drinks lagged slightly behind that of vodka, but in those particular years vodka had to yield first place...
...Thereafter we find a sharp increase-647 in Latvia, 672 in Azerbaidzhan, 688 in Turkmenia—and then another big jump: 806 in Estonia, 964 in Lithuania, 980 in Armenia, 1,016 in Georgia...
...This also signifies, no doubt, increased prosperity...
...Turning the sails of a windmill into the wind does not mean going against the wind...
...Let us add a profit, such as that made by the pure alcohol factories...
...Dividing this by the average price of a decaliter, we find that in 1970, 257 million decaliters of vodka were put on the market-19 million more than we previously calculated, on the basis of an annual growth rate of 5 percent in vodka production...
...To work out the cost of production of wine would be a sum with too many unknowns in it...
...Just you prove that it is because of hangovers, and not because the first day, like the first hour, back at work after a break is less productive than those that follow...
...Our Soviet state's price cannot, of course, be as exorbitant as the Czarist price (22 percent of which went to the manufacturer, who made a good profit even with that, and 78 percent to the Treasury), for, as the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia says, "in the U.S.S.R...
...Let us now examine this aspect of the matter, and see what we can find out, despite the deep secrecy surrounding it...
...Home-distilling has become easier in our time (and the struggle against it made more difficult) because the technology involved is now as simple as can be: no stills are needed for the brewing, saucepans will do...
...The retail price of a bottle of vodka is just as firm as its wholesale price was...
...This, then, is the picture as compared with the year 1940...
...Thus, in the section "Trade" there appeared, year after year, a table headed "Commodity Structure of the Retail Turnover in State and Co-operative Trade," with a column showing the consumption of drink, even though this was somewhat less than fully explicit, being entitled: "Alcoholic and Nonalcoholic Beverages...
...The purchase of many other commodities has increased since 1940 to a greater extent than that of alcohol: e.g., radio sets 38-fold, milk 13-fold, furniture 18-fold, and so on...
...It has become Commodity Number One, with Number Two ("clothing and underwear") and Number Three ("meat and sausages") lagging behind not by half a length, not by half a billion, but by 9 and 12 billion respectively...
...And, as a direct reply to Prince Vladimir's saying about Russia's gaiety, we have this: "That sort of gaiety will bring on a hangover...
...The increase in the consumption of alcohol has become transformed before our eyes into an uncontrollable process...
...In the table of indices already familiar to us, the price prevailing at that time is taken as 100...
...Now, let us deduct the receipts from wine (263 million decaliters) and beer (419 decaliters), amounting together to 8,423 million rubles...
...Expenditure on alcohol comes out of the household budget and not out of some abstract pocket or other...
...The very style in which wine and vodka, respectively, are taken shows the different places these drinks occupy in the use that the people make of them...
...Wine brought joy to the heart and boldness to the mind...
...Drinkers savored their wine, and their tongues did not falter, even if an old, mature wine should affect their legs and gradually spread a sweet languor all through their bodies...
...And reserves of money do exist among the people, they are increasing very fast, and there is nothing to be done with them except to put them in the savings bank...
...At the usual prices for cars, which our people have come to accept as normal, the sale of cars brings in a sum slightly larger than the sale of furniture...
...But that improvement has taken place not in a vacuum but amid concrete, historically formed conditions of life...
...As for the balance of spiritual gains and losses, who shall draw that up...
...Remaining faithful to the rule that it is better to underestimate than to overestimate, let us keep to this figure...
...Whatever commodity may be involved, the consumer possesses one means of reacting to an increase in its price, namely, ceasing to buy the commodity that has become more expensive...
...About wine and beer we will speak later...
...On that basis, we obtain a figure between 900 million rubles and something a little over 1 billion...
...They have merged two columns, which before had been presented separately: one for "beverages" and one for "other foodstuffs...
...Popular sayings provide the answer...
...While an increase in drinking by 20 percent in 13 years corresponded to persistent poverty among the people, the fact that it doubled in 10 years would be unthinkable unless the people had become better off and so able to allow themselves to spend such a lot on alcohol: let me recall that alcohol accounts for 15 percent of all expenditure in state and cooperative shops...
...Similarly, they have forgotten to enumerate, as they did before, between brackets, what these "other foodstuffs" consist of (coffee, mushrooms, etc...
...Sales of textile fabrics did not increase, they fell: but if we lump textile fabrics together with clothing and knitwear (which is much more reasonable than lumping vodka with kvass, since knitwear and textile fabrics do indeed go together, whereas kvass and vodka do not) we get a 1.7-fold increase...
...The art of drinking sprang from the art of winemaking...
...And, let us note, the prices of fruits, and also those of rooms, are governed by prices fixed by the State, and are subject to the turnover tax...
...An increase to a figure almost four-andahalf times that of 1940...
...So that application of the average percentage of trade mark-up when selling alcohol is illegitimate...
...What sort of gaiety is meant by this...
...The making of liqueurs like pertsovka or spotykach is more complicated, but their relative importance is slight and has little bearing on the matter at hand...
...In the next two years the increase was 22 percent...
...8, 1951), that "before the First World War the cost of producing all the vodka consumed in one year was 200 million rubles, but the consumers paid 900 million rubles for it...
...On the contrary, technical progress and the growth of productivity should have reduced, not increased, the cost of producing them...
...The table already mentioned, showing the "Dynamic of the Sale of Commodities," from which we learned that the realization of alcoholic beverages had increased 2.2-fold between 1960 and 1970, gave us a general impression, but failed to supply details for each kind of alcohol taken separately...
...To find this, let us take the same table, but use 1960 as our base year for calculations...
...In the 30 years after 1940, the index for alcohol products rose to 262, whereas their cost of production certainly did not increase, but undoubtedly fell...
...Deducting from that figure, therefore, 1 billion rubles for soft drinks, we see that 23.2 billion rubles was spent on alcohol...
...Thereby they confirm that further increases in the price of alcohol, in extracting money from the population...
...In those years, as I calculated above, the relative weight of "other foodstuffs" was, on the average, 3.2 percent of total purchases of foodstuffs...
...This did not happen, but let us assume for the moment that it did...
...Even the number of working hours lost through severe hangovers is a doubtful magnitude...
...Having become Commodity Number One, vodka is on its way to becoming also Calamity Number One...
...At the same time, though, the price of vodka must be kept, as the encyclopaedia puts it, "at a level that facilitates the struggle against alcoholism," that is, at a fairly high level...
...Vodka and wine have no such saturation point: he who drank yesterday will want to drink again today, and, furthermore, he who did not drink yesterday may want to drink today...
...What constitutes drunkenness and what does not...
...This is a firm price, fixed by the government in 1954...
...They drank with Phil, and Phil got beaten...
...What is a significant and what an insignificant proportion...
...The solving of both problems is all the more problematical in that on the alcohol front there is another force engaged, with which, though it is not much talked about, it is necessary to reckon very seriously...
...Very little, I fancy: the people who drink are not those who go to the savings bank, and those who go to the savings bank are not the ones who send their wives round to the shop to buy a half-liter...
...But now, all of a sudden, it has increased tenfold and, by 1970, has reached the figure of nearly 27 billion rubles, nine times as much as the expenditure on butter (p...
...Highest-purity rectified spirit, from which vodka is made, needs no further processing, all that has to be done is to dilute it with water...
...But let us try to examine a period closer to the present—say, the decade between 1960 and 1970...
...Alcohol is a drug...
...Perhaps, though, the expression "the sale of alcohol gave" is not quite correct, for, after all, what it gave it also took—from the population of the U.S.S.R...
...An increase in the price of meat or butter is not expected to have any favorable repercussions...
...All he can do is turn his mill so that its sails get as much wind as possible in them...
...There was even a temperance society...
...If, however, we ignore the first half of the 1950s, when the increase was especially vigorous, the average comes to 5 percent...
...In Czarist times people drank heavily, as anyone must realize who has read our classics...
...The only advantage from it would accrue to the Treasury...
...We have compared quantities...
...However, let us look at the table on p. 564, headed: "Average Size of Deposits in Savings Banks in the Different Republics...
...the production of vodka is not governed by fiscal purposes...
...Only one of the columns—"Other Foodstuffs"—suddenly makes an incredible jump in the year 1963...
...582 of the 1970 handbook...
...What purchases increased, and by how much, during those ten years...
...A bottle that yesterday cost 2 rubles today costs 2 rubles 10 kopecks—and at the end of the year, 1 billion rubles are lying on the little saucer with the blue border, as Ostap Bender used to say...
...Remembering what the encyclopaedia says about vodka production in our country not serving fiscal aims, let us now estimate how much the Treasury gets from the sale of all the vodka produced...
...It can be transported easily: in order to transport 10,000 rubles' worth of this commodity, all that is required is one three-ton truck, while 10,000 rubles' worth of the potatoes from which the vodka is made would weigh over 100 tons, for the transport of which 40 three-tonners would be needed...
...As, indeed, we observe...
...When people drink with their meals a weakish wine made from grapes, which heightens the appetite, this helps them to swallow their food...
...What is this level, which, while not pursuing base fiscal aims of profit, nevertheless helps to carry on a highminded struggle...
...The winegrower's aim was not to produce as much wine as possible but to produce the best wine, in terms of aroma and taste...
...On this basis .the sale of alcoholic products in the last 30 years emerges as follows: in 1950-75 (a decline Fifty Years Ago • The [Trotskyist] Opposition regarded it as scandalous that the [Stalin] government should obtain a high proportion of revenue from the state monopoly of vodka and acquire thereby a vested interest in the drunkenness of the masses...
...That was written about the Czarist period...
...Speedy intoxication raises from the depths of a man's heart not courage but violence, not joy of living but maudlin tears, not a feeling of benevolence but causeless and senseless rage...
...I have already compared this with the proceeds from the sale of vodka and shown that it amounts to little in comparison with the billions spent on the latter...
...If we can determine the rate of increase of vodka production in the period 1950-62, we shall possess a certain basis for supposition regarding subsequent developments...
...But does vodka attract to itself the money of the same groups of this allegedly homogeneous population as those who put theirs in the savings banks...
...Reading no longer gives any help in this matter...
...Another table (on page 587) shows "Commodities of Productive and Economic Importance Made Available for Sale to the Population," and in it we find, after coal, saw-timber and kerosene, 123,000 light cars sold in 1970...
...Deducting from this figure the proportion we have calculated for soft drinks, that is, a 24th, or 459 million, we obtain 10.5 billion which is 2.2 times less than the 1970 figure of 23.2 billion...
...The last year for which this information is supplied is 1962...
...If we compare successive issues of the yearbook over a number of years we observe that the figures for consumption of all the goods shown in the table increase more or less steadily from one year to the next...
...There are not even any real criteria where this question is concerned...
...The increase by four-andahalf times is therefore an increase in the actual physical quantity of alcohol drunk...
...Perhaps rates of increase really were higher than we supposed...
...If we take 18 kopecks as the average, we are certainly overestimating: however, let us stay with this hypothetical price...
...In the decade in question the retail turnover of this item increased 2.16fold...
...It would have been enough to increase this figure by one-and-a-half rubles per decaliter, as compared with 1960, for this to have a marked influence on our calculation...
...Fruit juices do not come into our calculation, as they figure in the "fruit" column, and in any case they are not a large item of consumption...
...if we take this lower variant as applying in the last ten years, we arrive at the figure of 238 million decaliters of vodka produced in 1970...
...There is only one essential consideration here—the repercussions that the given measure is expected to have...
...In the 1970 issue of the yearbook, in the column "Other Foodstuffs," against the year 1960 (page 582) we find precisely that total figure, obtained by combining the figures from the two previously published columns—a combination the editors have forgotten to draw the reader's attention to...
...To do this we have had to bring in data from the "Commodity Structure" table...
...Certainly not—though statistics give us no information on that point...
...And instantaneous intoxication is a very different matter from the protracted enjoyment of a drink that sharpens consciousness and stimulates thought...
...We thus get the figure of 220-230 million decaliters of soft drinks produced in 1970...
...But when people drink in order to stimulate themselves, a snack helps them to swallow a glass of vodka...
...Russia's gaiety lies in drinking...
...In rate of increase, purchases of alcohol in the decade 1960-70 were second only to furniture, the purchase of which grew 2.6-fold...
...He sticks it out through a bad day, and when a good day comes he gets drunk...
...The average annual increase over 12 years was about 9 percent...
...And, gradually, this gaiety became transformed into a national calamity...
...In 1955 the country reached, and a year later surpassed, the level of Czarist times, and by 1970 was producing nearly twice as much: 6.35 liters of pure alcohol per head of the population...
...The wine monopoly, which he introduced, was, according to him, "essentially a measure intended to reduce drunkenness...
...Despite the fact that the working people bought motorcars too, they were unable to spend all their money...
...In Czarist Russia, in the 13 years between 1900 and 1913, the demand for vodka per head of population rose by 20 percent (Large Soviet Encyclopaedia, 2nd edition, Vol...
...A liter of vodka, fully paid for and also giving a profit to the two enterprises through which it has passed, is now worth 28 kopecks, although we have allowed the vodka factory a very generous cost of production and a healthy profit...
...The most important symptom that this is happening, it seems to me, can be seen in the speed with which vodka has become the leading commodity in popular consumption...
...And so, without going carefully through all the figures, and merely by reading those for one category of goods, we are taken aback, and find that there is something odd here...
...Accordingly, the trade mark-up of 14 kopecks per liter of vodka, which I have assumed, is not too small, but rather an extremely big mark-up...
...This was admittedly a difficult question...
...Thus, then, vodka contributed to the budget to the tune of 11.9 billion rubles, and wine and beer a good deal less-6.2 billion...
...We know it without being told: the miller was calmly pouring corn onto the millstone...
...A toast to the Muses, a toast to reason...
...It takes the form of payments to the Treasury, levied by way of an allocation from profits and the turnover tax—which, as textbooks of financial science explain, is certainly not an indirect tax and, indeed, not even any sort of tax at all but merely an allocation to the Treasury...
...Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed fully explicable in the period just after the war), in 1960-200, in 1965-283, in 1970 439...
...Of course not...
...A price was fixed—and has been maintained ever since—which, though accessible to almost everyone, was ruinous for them...
...In order to accomplish our task, it is essential to differentiate between trading expenses on the basis of the characteristics of each commodity...
...But our error, inevitable in such calculations, cannot be of any great significance: even if the sale of mushrooms in the state shops had increased tenfold, would this seriously effect the trade turnover as a whole...
...Instead, let us make the following calculation...
...Sensible people don't engage in such tomfoolery...
...Let us suppose that wine and beer were sold in the shops in 1940, that is, 30 years earlier, at their wholesale price, without any allocations to the budget and without any turnover tax...
...But that government's whole policy in this sphere proceeded from the assumption (though this was usually kept concealed) that drunkenness was an unavoidable evil and that it could be combated only by means of vodka...
...First, let us deduct from the total receipts from alcohol (23.2 billion rubles) 4 percent, the proportion by which the price of alcohol was raised in 1970 (cf., the table of indices on p. 601...
...Could it be that "drinking" had ceased to constitute our national "gaiety...
...And, finally stock-taking—the operation testifying to the degree of trust that our state has learned to place in its trading apparatus—is incomparably easier to carry out where alcohol is concerned, even if it be done every week, than in the case of books or haberdashery...
...Soda water and kvass are sold more cheaply...
...Within the first week of the October Revolution, we remember, the Bolsheviks had to contend with the scourge of mass drunkenness which belonged to the heritage of Mother Russia...
...Fighting against the increasing consumption of alcohol is like Don Quixote's campaign against the windmills...
...And also, of course, the amounts involved...
...Oh, well done...
...In the handbook Promyshlennost SSSR (Soviet Industry) for 1964, the production of vodka and of soft drinks, respectively, was given for the years between 1950 and 1964...
...Cervantes did not need to tell us what the miller was doing while the Knight galloped, spurring Rosinante, toward his mill...
...The former tells us [2nd edition, Vol...
...Say what you like, that amount of money can cover the state's expenditure on public health (9.3 billion) and on science (6.6 billion), and still leave quite a bit in hand...
...In the table "Dynamics of Sales of Most Important Commodities" (on p. 558 of the yearbook for 1970), the readings are taken with the year 1940 as 100...
...Now we will proceed to the year 1970...
...Increased prosperity cannot but result in an increased demand for alcohol...
...These figures are given in old rubles: translating them into the new values we get 11,023 million and 1,373 million— altogether, then, 12,396 million...
...This seems normal so far as trade as a whole is concerned, but wrong when we calculate what a lot the state actually makes out of the sale of alcohol products...
...But water has been added to the alcohol so that what we have before us now is not, in fact, a decaliter of pure alcohol but 2.5 decaliters of vodka—practically 2.5, that is, maybe a little less, but since we are taking the next higher figure in all these calculations we can neglect the difference...
...If 3.6 billion rubles' worth of furniture is sold and 1.2 billion worth of motorcycles, that certainly confirms that little is available that is worth buying...
...But, as the Roman Emperor Vespasian said when he put a tax on the public urinals: "Money doesn't smell...
...Together, this comes to 16 percent of the price of pure alcohol, and with this addition we obtain the factory price...
...But the textbook recommended by the Ministry for use in financial colleges, Finansy SSSR, written by a group of authors headed by Professor Allakhverdian, Moscow, 1962, says something quite different: "The turnover tax constitutes the difference between the wholesale price for the industry and the wholesale price for the enterprise...
...But in two of the book's tables (on pp...
...It would be odd if this were to be explained by increased thriftiness on the part of the Soviet people: thriftiness does not increase two-and-a-half-fold in five years...
...What we now have to do is to separate the components of this mixture...
...The Large Soviet Encyclopaedia tells us, in the article on "The Wine Monopoly" (2nd edition, Vol...
...Only in comparatively recent times has it become possible to purify it of fusel oil...
...That is an excellent step on the state's part: the only thing is, it is not clear how it is supposed to help those workers' households where they drink...
...The government excused the vodka monopoly on the ground that it combated effectively the even more disastrous mass consumption of home-brewed alcohol...
...But statistics show that the quantity of alcohol consumed per head of population was not so large, and in any case was a great deal less than, say, in France, where everyone drinks, but what they drink is mainly a rather weak wine (five or six degrees...
...We must not forget, however, how many billion were spent on alcohol (23.2) and how many on furniture (3.6, that is, six-and-a-half times less...
...The resulting figure is 22,272 million...
...It is clearly evident that the largest deposits are found in the republics from which southern fruits are sent to the northern and central parts of the U.S.S.R...
...In the book Ekonomika, organizatsiya i planirovaniye spirtovogo proizvodstva (the economics, organization, and planning of alcohol production), by V. G. Pykhov, published by Pishchevaya Promyshlennost (the Food Industry Press), Moscow 1966, no data are given regarding the cost of production of vodka, any more than they are to be found in any other generally accessible work...
...The sort of drinking bout that calls, the morning after, for "a hair of the dog that bit you" is fraught with a principle of rapid development...
...We, however, are struggling against drunkenness...
...They spend a day celebrating and have sore heads for a week from the hangover...
...Otherwise, what would be the point of increasing the price of alcohol...
...But what significance have expenditures of this order when you compare them with the amount of money that remains unspent in the savings-bank deposits...
...To do this we need first to determine the average price of wine—a product that comes in many different varieties with different prices...
...The state's share (not counting the profits taken by the industry and by the trade organizations) is therefore 5 rubles 8 kopecks on every liter, or 92.4 percent of what the consumer pays...
...From the statistical yearbook Narodnoye Khozyaistvo SSSR [ The Soviet Economy] we learn that in 1913 about 120 million decaliters of vodka were produced, and 800 million decaliters of beer...
...Sales of alcoholic products increased 2.2fold, and this ratio of 1:2.2, clearly shown in the "Dynamic" table (the actual figures being 200:439), confirms to a remarkable degree that our previous calculations, in which some of the figures used had to be hypothetical, were broadly correct, since they resulted in this same figure of 2.2-fold for the increase in the sale of alcohol over the ten-year period in question...
...Later on we shall perhaps be able to determine their cost of production fairly accurately, but to start with we need to establish what relation there is between the cost of production of alcoholic drinks and the price at which they are sold...
...Social statistics, which are prudent enough anyway, are superprudent on that aspect of things...
...Can this percentage apply in the case of vodka...
...However successfully the drink business may have developed, we still need to compare it with the overall dynamic of popular consumption over a series of years: when we have done this, our picture will be complete...
...Then, in ascending order, come: Kirghizia, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, the R.S.F.S.R., the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Byelorussia...
...And the government received 900 million rubles, which means that a liter of vodka was sold for 75 kopecks...
...In 1959 production fell by 5.5 percent, but thereafter the rate of increase turned upward: in 1960 it was 0.6 percent, in 1961 5.5 percent, in 1962 11.3 percent...
...A decaliter—ten liters—is approximately the capacity of an ordinary large domestic bucket...
...Without trying to find who is closer to the truth in this matter, let us stick to the unscientific and simple-minded definition used by every worker: vodka costs the state so-much, but they make us pay so-much...
...But for all the scandalous poverty in which the people lived, the Czarist government was able to fix a price for vodka that did not prevent the people from drinking, as Count Witte noted—"a price that was accessible but ruinous...
...The annual increase in the output of soft drinks was sometimes 5, sometimes 6, sometimes 7 million decaliters—sometimes even only 1 million...
...The majority rejected the proposal...
...The increase in purchases of furniture was 2.6fold...
...For this reason, any analogy between the consumption of alcohol in our country and in those countries where they drink wine with their meals, morning, noon, and night (France, for example) is not to be taken seriously...
...I have not been able to decide which definition of the turnover tax to accept—that given in the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia, or that given in the official textbook...
...Unlike wine and ale, vodka intoxicates immediately, and people drink it down at one gulp, so as not to notice its taste and smell...
...Before us we have a highly moral, absolutely sober table, without any trace of wine or vodka...
...The view has long become established that drunkenness in those days was a consequence of the people's poverty and their hopeless subjection...
...And making alcohol more expensive will hardly help, either...
...Unlike those related to the partaking of wine among a group of friends, they speak only of the evil arising from drink—with the sole exception of the basic proposition that "Russia's gaiety lies in drinking...
...Nobody can say...
...I t is necessary to look into this matter of the missing column...
...The years after 1905 were years of reaction...
...The table shows that 62,000 such cars were sold in 1960 and 64,000 in 1965, 87,000 in 1969 and in 1970 123,000...
...There is not much published about the vodka industry, and we have to deduce the cost of production of vodka by analogy with pure alcohol production...
...For the sale of cars from the Togliatti works (with a planned annual output of 440,000 cars for the first few years) to even half-fill the "goods-vacuum," these cars would have to be sold at the fantastic price of 50,000 rubles apiece...
...But can the working people manage to buy motorcars...
...We are waging this struggle by raising the price of alcohol and restricting the hours between which it can be sold...
...This was the reaction expected when the price of alcohol was raised to such a level that, it was assumed, drinkers would cease to buy it, so that drunkenness would then disappear automatically...
...What the government gained as producer of vodka it lost as industrial employer through the inefficiency of drunken workers and a high rate of accidents in industry...
...Later the encyclopaedia article says that vodka prices are fixed by the Soviet state at a level that facilitates the struggle against alcoholism...
...And a problem that arises entirely from a process that cannot be controlled cannot be solved, either...
...If all the soft drinks sold were sold in bottles, that would mean 5-6 billion bottles, or 20-25 bottles per person—quite a lot, it would seem, since soft drinks are purchased mainly in the towns and mostly in the summer...
...Our hypothetical figure can be checked...
...In such periods people drink more...
...In 1956 it was 5 percent, in 1957 14 percent, in 1958 3.6 percent...
...Not in vain has the subject of alcohol completely vanished from the press and is steadily fading even from statistics...
...In absolute amount, however, what was spent on "the wise, the good, the eternal," was only 1.7 billion rubles, or half as much as was spent on furniture, and a 13th as much as was spent on alcohol...
...Let us take these figures year by year...
...The retail price must meet the expenses of trade: maintenance of staff, transport, payment for premises, etc...
...At all events, this price check shows that the figure of 238 million decaliters was no exaggeration...
...But can we be certain that the growth in the consumption of alcohol is really regarded as an evil...
...It is reasonable to begin with the nonalcoholic beverages, since they are much cheaper than the alcoholic ones, and the inaccuracies unavoidable in calculating what they represent in the total will have less bearing on the ultimate result...
...This was vodka's contribution to the budget...
...We know how much of it was sold in 1913: 118.9 million decaliters...
...Savings-bank deposits have increased to a remarkable extent in the last five years: from 18.7 billion rubles in 1965 to 46.6 billion in 1970...
...And in that year the amount produced was 77.7 million decaliters...
...Even salt and tea are accorded separate columns...
...What remains is the money received from the sale of vodka...
...When talking about the standard of living or the expenditures of the population, we consider the latter as a sort of "average," homogeneous mass...
...This expectation must have been based on the assumption that drunkenness was a phenomenon prevalent precisely among the less-well-off strata of the population, and they would cease to buy alcohol because it had become too dear for them...
...They do not provide much information, especially so far as the amount spent by the Soviet citizen on the purchase of alcoholic drinks is concerned...
...What quantity of soft drinks was produced (and drunk) in 1970...
...What the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia says coincides on many points with the statement of Count S. Y. Witte, who was Minister of Finance under Czar Alexander III and his son, Nicholas the Last...
...Taking into account the installation in recent years of automatic vending machines for soda water, let us increase this figure to 250-300 million decaliters...
...First of all we need to establish the actual dimensions of vodka production, of which the yearbooks have been silent for the last nine years...
...Commodity Number One" is part of The Samizdat Register, edited by Roy A. Medvedev, and copyright ©1977 by the Merlin Press, Ltd...
...Alcohol does not go bad, as meat and butter do, does not turn sour, like milk, does not go out of fashion, like clothes and footwear, does not require such elaborate packing as china and procelain...
...or 12...
...If we assume that in the years omitted here the number sold was the same as in the years adjacent to them, we get the figure of 800,000 cars sold during the entire 11-year period...
...What if the increase in the consumption of alcohol is a natural consequence of increasing prosperity...
...The trading organizations themselves probably reckon in a different way...
...In this case, receipts from vodka in 1970 came to 13.1 billion rubles, and the net revenue obtained by the Treasury (92.4 percent of the total) to 11.9 billion...
...Not to mention that, given the scale that the alcohol trade has attained, every 5 percent increase in the price of alcohol brings in cash to the amount of 1 billion rubles, that is, as much as the whole of the dressmaking industry and all the mending done in dressmaking establishments throughout the country...
...The expenses incurred in the alcohol trade are much lower than in any other branch...
...This definition is certainly a lot clearer than "the difference between the wholesale price for the industry and the wholesale price for the enterprise...
...Or had we gone over to kvass...
...The average price of wine, therefore, was 2 rubles" 54 kopecks a liter...
...It may be that, besides the failure of the harvest, socialist emulation between workers in different branches of the food industry played a certain role here, too...
...In the factories where liqueur vodkas are produced this procedure is more complicated: in industrial production there is the labor force to be paid, and the technical personnel too, and there are costs of depreciation to be covered...
...In this table everything is shown, not in rubles, as in the "commodity-structure" table previously analyzed, but in percentages calculated in comparable prices...
...With vodka it is another matter: making it more expensive is intended to promote the fight against drunkenness, it is a measure of a positive character...
...178 and 201) we find, among other things, the wholesale price of the pure alcohol from which it is made...
...Until then it had shown a comparatively small expenditure, much smaller than for butter...
...In saying this I do not wish to imply that it is wrong to increase the price of alcohol...
...When considering wine and vodka it is necessary to keep in mind the way in which they are taken...
...Undoubtedly, increased prosperity is a factor in this...
...But is much money being transferred in this way...
...But, if so, what would be the point of concealing such remarkable progress...
...Russian popular sayings about vodka and drinking are characteristic in this respect...
...Let us work out the average price of a bottle of one of these drinks...
...In the first case we see that 110,230 million rubles was spent on "beverages," and 13,730 million on "other foodstuffs...
...We open our yearbook of the Soviet economy in 1970 at page 601, to find "Indices of State Retail Prices...
...Mineral water costs 10 kopecks a bottle...
...Let us try to discover what is meant by "Other Foodstuffs...
...Clearly, alcoholic drinks have become an integral part of popular consumption in a number of countries...
...On the other hand, the concealment of factual material concerning the question of drink hinders from the outset any attempt to fight against the increase in the consumption of alcohol, for society cannot combat an evil without knowing its locations and its dimensions...
...And clearly, at a certain level of development the consumption of alcohol becomes a national calamity...
...Only fruitflavored drinks are dearer...
...In the first three years of this period the increase was very significant-50 percent (from 62.8 million decaliters to 95.4 million...
...This, then, is the expenditure on alcohol, diluted with the expenditure on kvass and Narzan water...
...it was used by the rulers as a fiscal convenience and it kept the masses politically befuddled...
...These figures are not presented straightforwardly in the statistical publication mentioned, but have to be deduced by comparing various data that are given in it...
...For, if they were to list them honestly, they would have to add beverages to the mushrooms, while if they were to omit beverages from the list, something utterly absurd would appear to have happened—mushrooms, laurel leaves, and coffee being sold on a scale that is hard to conceive...
...Alcoholic drinks hold the leading position, not only in amount purchased and rate of increase, but also in profitability, which exceeds every other branch of trade...
...Translating these figures into terms of pure alcohol, we get the figure of 3.35 liters per head of the population...
...For this purpose of self-stimulation a weak wine will not suffice, and so our people do not drink it...
...The miller never thinks of governing the wind and struggling against it...
...And yet the increase in consumption of alcohol was only 20 percent in 13 years...
...In Georgia they have been drinkers since ancient times, theirs is an old wine-growing country, but what they drink, for preference, is wine—and, what is most important, they drink it in their own national manner, which is very different from the manner of drinking customary in Russia since the time of the farming-out of the drink trade and the "wine monopoly...
...Let us assume, so as not to make any mistake, that after 1963 the rate of increase was 9-10 million decaliters each year...
...A simple division of the figures in the column for 1970 by the corresponding figures in the column for 1960 reveals the dynamic of purchases over the decade: 1.8 times as much meat was bought in 1970 as in 1960, nearly 1.5 times as much butter, 1.6 times as much sugar...
...The state's wholesale price of pure alcohol is, for first-quality rectified spirit, 5 rubles 90 kopecks a decaliter, and for rectified spirit of the highest purity, 6 rubles 10 kopecks a decaliter...
...On the average, trade costs make up 6.24 percent of retail turnover (cf., the table on page 596 of the yearbook of the Soviet economy for 1970...
...Let us deduct this sum from the total expenditure on alcohol, which we calculated earlier to be 10,564 million rubles...
...29]: "The turnover tax is added as the difference between the retail price (allowing for trade discount) and the wholesale price...
...But what if the working people have no need of such help...
...But even a few years ago this item of expenditure was not such a hush-hush subject, and in earlier issues of the yearbook (which began to be published in 1956) it was possible to find something about it...
...In this case the raw material accounts, on the average, for 84 percent of the cost, and processing is responsible for the remaining 16 percent...
...Alcohol does not demand much shop space: a single counter served by one shop assistant will bring a food store a larger trade turnover than ten other counters with ten other shop assistants...
...In other words, the increase in the prices of all other foodstuffs was 33 percent, whereas the price of alcohol had risen 162 percent, or five times as much...
...A decaliter of alcohol, leaving the gates of the vodka factory in new containers, will cost not 6 rubles 10 kopecks but 7 rubles 8 kopecks...
...However strange it may seem at first glance, the output of soft drinks has paralleled the output of vodka for many years now...
...Nobody is interested in doing it...
...All this can be read in Witte's Memoirs (Vospominanii, published by Slovo, 1922, p. 73...
...Turkmenia, Azerbaidzhan, Armenia, and the Baltic republics are far from being the republics where people drink the most...
...Let us assume the figure is 1 billion...
...The habit of drug-taking spreads much faster than any other...
...There is another possibility, too: as a result of the remarkable extension of winemaking (from 77.7 million decaliters in 1960 to 268 in 1970, a 3.3-fold increase), new and more expensive varieties of wine may have been put on sale, so raising the average price of wine as compared with 1960...
...In only two cases out of eleven did it exceed 7 million (once it was 18 million and once 14 million...
...However, by its very nature, an increase in the price of alcohol makes a much stronger impact on the worker's household than would be made by an increase in the cost of communal services...
...This is home-distilled vodka samogon...
...In those countries where vines are cultivated, in the homeland of wine, people did not gulp it down...
...These data throw little light, unfortunately, on this question...
...How slow their growth rates were in those days...
...And so, at last, we have found where the dog lies buried, in the table called "Commodity Structure of Retail Turnover...
...In comparison with alcohol, furniture appears as quite a secondary commodity—which, moreover, has a saturation point, just as with sewing machines and radio sets...
...Can it for even a moment be supposed that some special increase had occurred in the cost of production of alcoholic drinks, necessitating an increase in their price...
...In countries where the vine was not grown, the people brewed beer and ale, hymned by Burns in John Barleycorn: John Barleycorn was a hero bold, Of noble enterprise, For if you do but taste his blood 'T will make your courage rise...
...Between increasing the price of alcohol and increasing any other price there is no difference of principle...
...The article is reprinted here with permission of W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., the book's American publisher...
...Therefore, if we assume for vodka a cost of production half that of pure alcohol, this will be an extremely generous estimate...
...The calculations I propose to undertake start from the figures for the production of vodka alone, which are given in the statistical yearbook, though only for an earlier period...
...It is capable of upsetting the most optimistic calculations...
...The amount of alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages sold a decade previously is known to us from the yearbook: 11,023 million new rubles...
...I have said little about home-distilling: statistics do not take account of it, but this uncontrolled magnitude must not be forgotten...
...At this stage a fresh metamorphosis, still more striking than the previous chemical changes, takes place in the formation of the price of vodka that is immaterial so far as the consumer is concerned...
...What we arrive at finally is this: a wholesale price for vodka of 28 kopecks a liter, plus 14 kopecks trade mark-up, giving 42 kopecks in all...
...Such processes are utilized, so far as this can be managed—and that's all...
...That table also shows that purchases of footwear of all kinds increased to more than twice the earlier figure...
...From the information given in the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia about the cost of producing vodka before World War I we see that the Czarist government stung the people for seven-ninths—or 78 percent—of the selling price of vodka...
...The calculation is very rough, but it is certainly an underestimate, since we can be sure that in 1940 beer and wine were not being sold on a purely philanthropic basis, without any benefit accruing to the budget...
...Such an enormous increase in the consumption of a commodity could not have occurred unless the consumers had become addicted to it as something they must have...
...In order to establish this clearly, let us just take a look at the yearbook for 1960, turn to the table that interests us, and compare this with the corresponding table in the yearbook for 1970...
...The technology of transforming pure alcohol into vodka is very much simpler than the manufacture of the pure alcohol itself: diluting the stuff, pouring it into bottles, and corking them, that's all there is to it...
...Statistics provide no key to understanding the reasons why those groups of the working people who put their money in the savings banks are far from coinciding with the ones who invest heavily in bottles of vodka...
...2, article on "Alcoholism...
...In the remote northern regions of the U.S.S.R., to which pure alcohol is still sent, its transformation into vodka at the consumer's table is effected quite simply: each person dilutes it according to taste, or, more correctly, to capacity...
...Let us reestablish the true situation, if only in the form in which it was shown to us in the first issues of the yearbook...
...It can only lead to the cutting down of other, necessary purchases by those families that have no money to spare, that is, those where such reductions are least to be desired...
...The significance of these figures is confirmed most convincingly by the very fact that they are concealed...
...Still keeping to the previously published column, with nonmanipulated values, which showed "other foodstuffs," let us calculate its magnitude for 1970 in terms of rubles...
...This is "printed publications," i.e., newspapers, magazines, and books, including textbooks...
...True, we do not obtain the previous accuracy to a million rubles, for the figures we have deduced are not direct figures but have been established through collation, by effecting a sort of "confrontation" between indices scattered in a number of different places...
...As compared with 1940, the base year, prices of all foodstuffs, excluding alcohol, had risen to the level of 133 percent...
...There is, though, another item of expenditure that, in rate of increase, falls not far behind vodka...
...In the first case two columns appear, in the second they have been merged...
...The increase in the price of alcohol does, of course, also result in a certain increase in expenditure on the part of those families that the government wishes to react in this way—those families that have money in reserve...
...And now we notice that in this remarkable table everything that people eat has been named, but of what people drink only tea is mentioned by name...
...This is not an easy task, but it is worth making the effort needed...
...Therefore, without trying to answer questions whose very formulation leaves open the possibility of answering both yes and no, I have kept to the firm ground of official data, from which I have been able to deduce certain figures where the actual statistics themselves are concealed...
...This column continued to appear for several years, but then in 1964 it vanished...
...Altogether, 18.1 billion...
...From ancient times, wine has added pleasure and animation to talk between friends...
...Prices of alcoholic beverages, however, stood at 262 percent of the 1940 level...
...We do not need statistical handbooks to tell us that...
...It is 24.2 billion rubles...
...For vodka (138.1 million decaliters) and beer (249 million decaliters) the sum expended was 8,590 million rubles...
...t is better to know the truth with a few inexactitudes than to remain content with the half-truth of unscrupulous manipulations...
...This mark-up recalls all too well the well-known saying: "The heifer on the other shore costs a quarter of a kopeck, but to ferry it over costs a ruble": yet the ferrying of the heifer in this case, which is done by ourselves and not by anyone on "the other shore," actually costs very little...
...Total purchases of foodstuffs by the population in that year came to 86 billion rubles, which means that the item we are looking for came to 2.8 billion rubles (3.2 percent of 86...
...The Czarist government did not advertise vodka or call upon the people to drink it...
...In the U.S.S.R...
...If we ignore home-distilling, the visible side of the alcohol trade is easily reducible to figures: so many million bucketsful bring in so much revenue...
...Pushkin, Bacchic Song (1825) Style in drinking depends very much, of course, on what is being drunk...
...This was already the increased price that Witte condemned, blaming the Ministry of Finance, from which he had departed long since, for setting itself a fiscal task—increasing state revenue from drink and, without combating drunkenness, ruining the people: a price that was "accessible but ruinous...
...An increase is effected somewhere along the line, at one of the hardly noticeable halts between the factory and the retail shop...
...Draining one's glass did not mean "knocking it back...
...In terms of money, this means 6.2 billion rubles out of the 10.1 billion received for wine and beer...
...Ten years later the scourge was still there...
...The reverse, dark side, however, is hard to express in figures, and any such figures can be contested...
...What seemed to Don Quixote a wicked giant was to the miller a means of livelihood...
...The sale of alcohol gave, in money terms, in 1970, as much as the sale of clothing and underwear together with the sale of butter and other dairy produce (cf., the "Commodity Structure" table, not forgetting that not a word about alcohol is to be found in it...
...But the selling price is 5 rubles 50 kopecks...
...Analysis of this question would take us too far from our subject...
...Unimportant facts are not hidden so carefully...
...In this way we get: soft drinks: vodka: 1950 — 72 62 1953 — 87.8 95.4 1955 — 97.8 116.9 1956 — 97.2 122.9 1957 — 115.2 140.2 1958 — 120.1 145.3 1959 — 134.6 137.3 1960— 141.5 138.1 1961 — 142.8 145.7 1962 — 149 162 1963 — 155 I52 As was to be expected with a planned, socialist system of production, output rose in a planned way, and the production of vodka decreased only in years when the harvest was poor (1959 and 1963...
...Let us recall that during these ten years the price of alcoholic drinks did not change, so that the increase in the quantity sold corresponded to the increase in the amount spent...
...One sought the bouquet in wine just as in talk one seeks the truth...
...The lowest average amount is shown for Moldavia-462 rubles...
...It has no need of refrigerators...
...It would likewise be groundless to suppose that people are saving up to buy particularly expensive articles, such as furniture or motorcycles...
...Deducting 13.1 billion from 23.2 billion, we get 10.1 billion rubles...
...Trade also must make a profit...
...In order to cover their higher expenditure on other goods, they need to add the average mark-up to those that sell profitably, even if the actual cost embodied in "profitable" goods is less than the average...
...To obtain 1 billion from alcohol is so much simpler...
...Be it noted that "wine," or "grain-wine," was the official name for vodka in those days...
...Drink, and beat people up—that's the life...
...A mysterious obscurity began to gather around the subject of alcohol...
...In order to obtain an additional billion from the work of the dressmaking workshops it would be necessary to double the prices they charge, which is unthinkable...
...How much was obtained from the sale of wine and beer...
...In a certain sense, this is so...
...Every ruble received by a food shop was due, for 27 kopecks out of the 100, to the sales of alcohol...
...Drink beer and hit your fatherinlaw in the face, eat pies and beat your mother-in-law...
...The encyclopaedia was right: 18 billion rubles is only a small proportion of a budget of 156 billion, not quite 12 percent...
...the production of vodka is not governed by fiscal purposes and the income obtained from selling it accounts for an insignificant proportion of the state's revenue...
...They drink this wine not in order to get drunk and find oblivion, but as an accompaniment to meals, just as in other countries people drink water while they eat...
...It listed, between brackets: "Coffee, spices, vitamins, mushrooms, soya-bean products, etc...
...In the commodity-structure table that I have used several times there is not even a column for this item...
...Down to 1963, the yearbook itself provided the details...
...The Opposition proposed that the government should tentatively, as an experiment, suspend the vodka monopoly for a year or two...
...It stands ready in the second echelon: but it does not form part of the high command's reserves—on the contrary, it is not subordinate to the high command at all, and is subject to no planning...
...However, although the price of alcohol is not increased for the sake of gain, but in order to promote the fight against drunkenness, t here are no grounds for disdaining the revenue obtained...
...For example's sake let us recall the amount spent on alcohol in 1970, namely, 23.2 billion rubles...
...The increase of 162 percent (index 262 minus 100) therefore represents net revenue to the Treasury...
...Starting out from the price of vodka as 5 rubles 50 kopecks a liter and the price of beer as 40 kopecks a liter, it is easy to calculate how much of those drinks was bought in 1960, when the yearbook gave figures for the output of all three kinds of alcohol...
...To fill this vacuum by making alcoholic drinks more expensive would probably prove as difficult as to reduce the level of drunkenness by raising the price-level...
...In a special column we find mention of various fruits, berries, watermelons and melons...
...This means that the share of the total represented by wine was 1,974 million rubles...
...They alone contribute to the consumption of alcohol, which has increased at such a rate...
...But since it is obvious, even to the naked eye, how disproportionately "other foodstuffs" increased after 1963, this fact, together with the disappearance of the "beverages" column, reveals to the attentive reader the whole essence of the manipulation of figures that the compilers of the yearbook have effected...
...This measure considerably increased the revenue from drink...
...Would it be 10 percent...
...Though statistics fail to quantify this fact, they do indirectly confirm it...
...Drink, and smash your glass—and if anybody doesn't like it, smash his face in...
...And although we have in every case hitherto allowed a more than sufficient "margin" for every hypothetical magnitude, this time it will be reasonable to assume that trading expenses plus trading profit make up not more than half of the wholesale price of the commodity itself, that is, 14 kopecks a liter...
...All our calculations relate to the period up to 1970 inclusive, when an increase in alcohol prices began and the campaign against alcoholism was raised to a higher level, in accordance with the formulation of the Large Soviet Encyclopaedia—a level that would enable a struggle to be waged...
...Separate mention is made of butcher's meat and poultry, tinned meat, tinned vegetables and tinned fish, cheese, and eggs...
...According to this table, total purchases by the population in state and cooperative shops in 1970 amounted to 155.2 billion rubles...
...Accordingly, the cost of nonalcoholic beverages comes to no more than a 24th of the total expenditure on drink, taking the latter to amount to the already calculated sum of 24.2 billion rubles...
...As numerator we will put the figure for soft drinks, in millions of decaliters, and as denominator the figure for vodka, in the same terms...
...or 15...
...A certain transference of investment takes place: some of the money deposited in the savings bank is taken from there and invested in a bottle of vodka that has increased in price...
...Mushrooms, soya-bean products, and so on accounted, of course, for only a very small proportion of the total amount spent by the working people in state shops—according to my calculation, 3.2 percent of all expenditure on foodstuffs...
...Everything is named, everything, it would seem, has been accounted for—but even after this there remain certain articles of consumption left unnamed, on which, nevertheless, the colossal sum of 27 billion rubles has been spent, or nearly a third of the total expenditure on all foodstuffs...
...This percentage, applied to the cost of vodka such as was sold at an average price, up to 1971, of 5 rubles 50 kopecks a liter (I have taken as my average the price of ordinary vodka: liqueurs were cheaper, but there were also some kinds of vodka that were more expensive than this), would come to 34 kopecks per liter, the factory price of the commodity itself being 28 kopecks...
...A factory must strive to reduce its cost of production, and if this is brought down below the wholesale price, the difference constitutes the factory's profit...
...During the entire period of 77 years since the state vodka monopoly was introduced, the price has been determined by a variety of considerations, but never by the cost of production...
...The price of wine was seriously increased...
...Alcohol is, indeed, the leading commodity among all those purchased by our people...
...Deducting this sum from the current, halfhonest total for "other foodstuffs," amounting to 27 billion rubles, we obtain the figure for what, in the early issues of the yearbook, was entitled, almost artlessly: "Alcoholic and Nonalcoholic Beverages...
...Let us raise our glasses, let's move them together...
...would not affect the money lying in the savings banks, which lies there principally owing to the "goods vacuum...
...Besides, "printed publications" are bought not only by the working people but also by institutions— libraries, schools, and even barber shops— whereas vodka and beer are bought by nobody apart from the workers, officeworkers, collective-farmers and intelligentsia of our country...
Vol. 24 • September 1977 • No. 4
