The opinion that the Russians are historically the most alcohol-consuming nation, that alcohol has been in our blood since ancient times, has been foisted on everyone for decades now. In fact, our homeland has traditionally been the soberest country in the world. We were in penultimate place in the world in terms of alcohol consumption per capita up to the beginning of the twentieth century.
- Before Russia was baptized our ancestors had not known what alcohol was (vodka was a tincture (restorative drink) of herbs made of pure spring water, and mead was a non-alcoholic honey-fruit drink). There had been a substitution of notions!
In 1858-1859 in Russia, for the third time in its history, a wave of "tavern" revolts broke out and a powerful teetotaler movement arose. There was an anti-alcohol riot in 32 provinces (in total there were 50 provinces in Russia at the time). Tavernkeepers were crushed for making the people alcoholized and our ancestors destroyed 3.5 thousand distilleries. This was our people's answer to the attempt to get them and their children accustomed to beverages (a warning to the profiteers and hooch producers!). The rebels were dispersed by the troops, and the church connived at people getting intoxicated (it still watches quietly people consume). It is also an accomplice in alcoholization via communion, wedding, baptism, etc. At baptism, a child is given a teaspoon of some liquid with wine, which is the equivalent of 150 grams of vodka for an adult. What kind of love for children is that?!
Thousands of villages and townships, hundreds of thousands of people had made up their minds to close down beverage houses. In many provinces (Kovno, Vilna, Saratov, Kursk, Tula and others) sobriety societies began to arise. Hundreds of thousands of people, in some five-six months, without any prior excitement and proclamations, in different parts of the vast country gave up alcohol.
The teetotaling movement which had begun was interrupted by a rude interference of the official authorities. The Minister of Finance issued a decree: "... Decrees of town and village societies on abstinence should be destroyed and henceforth town meetings and village assemblies should not be allowed for that purpose. Over 11 thousand peasants were imprisoned in that context. The Minister of Finance wrote to the chief procurator of the Holy Synod: "The absolute prohibition of hot wine by means of religious threats and vow promises having a strong effect on the minds of common people should not be allowed, as contrary not only to the general notion to benefit moderate consumption of wine but also to those resolutions, on the basis of which the government keep the wine houses to pay off".
The people were outraged at the actions of the tsarist government, which had resorted to repression against the teetotaler movement,
- as well as by the behaviour of the priests of the church. All this contributed to the escalation of the revolutionary situation.
Since that time, to organize sobriety societies became impossible for a long time. But the popular protest against wine, supported by the writings of leading doctors, teachers, scientists and educators, continued to have an impact on the mind, on people's search for ways to overcome alcoholization. Despite the government's desire to maintain alcoholization at the same level, it continued to decrease, which is indicated by the data on alcohol consumption per capita.
Thus in 1863-1866, there was an average of 4.55 litres of pure alcohol per capita annually, 10 years later it became 4.18, another 10 years later -3.32, and in 1893 - 2.46 litres. Thus there is no doubt that, contrary to the actions of the government, thanks to the influence of the best part of our intellectuals and national enlighteners, since the sixties of the 19th century before last the consumption of alcoholic beverages in the country had been gradually decreasing, and in the same proportion the number of "alcoholic" deaths had been decreasing in the country. While in 1870 there were 4077 deaths from alcohol, in 1878 - 3240 deaths.
By the beginning of the 1890s, the tsarist government decided to reform vodka production and trade, taking the entire lucrative industry into its own hands and introducing a wine monopoly.
The government reform had an immediate impact on per capita consumption of wine products, which began to increase. During the 17-20 years from 1893 to 1910 it rose from 2.46 to 4.7 litres, and by 1913 to 6.09 litres. The pre-revolutionary history of our state shows that the tsarist government, seeing the undoubted evil of alcohol, took no action against it.
All-Russian Congress on the fight against alcoholization and alcoholism in 1910 (where 150 doctors and medical scientists were among delegates) made a special decision on this issue: "Food product may be only such substance, which is absolutely harmless for an organism. Alcohol in any dosage is the narcotic drug of great harm to the human body. It poisons and destroys the body and shortens human life by an average of 20 years.
The resolution adopted at the 11th Pirogov Congress of Russian doctors in 1915 reads: "Alcohol may not be referred to as a nutritional agent and the population must be familiarised with it.
First edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia vol. 2, p. 116, 1947: "Alcohol is classified as a strong narcotic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) decided in 1975, at its 28th session in Geneva, that: "alcohol is a drug undermining the health of mankind".
At this point in time, the ranking of alcohol as a drug might appear absurd and unfounded to an average man. But we should not forget that just 150 years ago, various drugs were also considered as mere specific stimulants and were widely used as a sedative, to treat rheumatism, to cough up colds or even to lose weight. Many scientists advocated the "beneficial" properties of drugs such as cocaine, amphetamine, LSD. Z. Freud promoted cocaine as a cure for depression, various neuroses, syphilis, alcoholism, morphine addiction and gamic disorders and actively used it in his psychotherapeutic practice. Cocaine, as Freud wrote, causes:
"...an uplift of the spirit and a prolonged euphoria, which is no different from the usual euphoria of a healthy person. You notice an increased capacity for self-control, a surge of vitality and an in increased efficiency. In other words, you remain a completely normal person, and very soon you simply do not believe that you are under the influence of the drug... Prolonged and strenuous physical activity is performed without leaving any feeling of fatigue. The result is achieved without any of the unpleasant side effects of alcohol. There is absolutely no craving for cocaine after the first or subsequent uses. By the way, most psychologists work according to Freud's methodology, and you can imagine what these junkies "scientifically" came up to.
In order to be substantive, there is one example. Freud "scientifically" reasoned that all normal boys want to kill their fathers and have gamic relations with their mothers. And all normal girls have an inferiority complex about their lack of a male reproductive organ. This is easily found in the psychology literature. And this nonsense is passed off as "SCIENCE" and they get paid and titles for it. As a result of this "teaching", we know how sad and mentally ill Sigmund Freud ended his life, aggravated by cocaine.
In 1885, the American Parke-Davis Company began selling cocaine in various forms, including a solution for intravenous injection with a needle attached. The commercial said the product 'will replace food for you, make the cowardly brave, the speechless eloquent... make the afflicted insensible to pain.
Also, one can't help but mention the psychologist Ronald Siegel's "remarkable" statement about cocaine: "its stimulating and pleasurable properties serve to strengthen the American national character with its proactivity, energy, irrepressible vigour and boundless optimism.
America's blind faith in immoral "doctors" and psychologists had a high price: in 1912 alone there were over 5,000 deaths related to cocaine use in the United States, but it was only in 1922 that it was outlawed.
In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, Russia enacted a "dry law" under pressure coming from the people. As a result, the production of alcohol in Russia was reduced to almost zero - less than 0.2 litres per capita per year (for medical purposes). Prohibition lasted 11 years and was abolished in 1925 by Trotskyists after Lenin's death. The dry law was cancelled by Trotskyist Rykov, which is why vodka was popularly nicknamed "Rykovka".
- The introduction of sobriety had a beneficial effect on the material well-being of the people. Thus, over an eight-month period, between August 1, 1914 through March 31, 1915, the number of deposits in the savings banks increased to 261.7 million rubles, while during the same period of 1913-1914 it made only 6.5 million rubles. The total amount of all the money deposited with the State Savings Bank exceeded two billion roubles (2134.7 million) by July 1, 1915, while in the old years, this amount did not reach even one billion.
On the whole, people willingly switched to a sober lifestyle. This is evidenced by the continued decline in alcohol consumption per capita in the following years, and by the reduction of all those negative phenomena in social life which were caused by alcohol.
Summing up the study of the year-long experience of sober life of that period, A.Mendelson wrote: "Now, when Russia has undergone a sobering experience which has lasted for over a year, an experience which causes delighted astonishment to our foreign friends: the English, French and Swedes, when that experience with all its beneficial consequences is experienced consciously by all the population, the further voluntary sober life has received in its favour an argument which has no equal in the history of mankind. The forced sobriety which burst into our life has propagated the Russian people with its results... Hundreds of thousands and millions of people will be voluntary teetotallers. But do not lead people into temptation again! So, the complete prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages must remain in force forever.
As the following experience of "liberalization" of the alcohol trade after the abolition of the prohibition in 1925 shows, the masses were not able to become the decisive factor in universal sobriety - outside the prohibition regime. Despite the large propaganda campaigns of the Soviet period (1928-1930), which followed after 1925, and the death of Lenin, who stood up for absolute sobriety, the strong Trotskyite opposition to the prohibition of dry law provoked a slow, but then annually increasing growth of alcohol consumption in Russia.
The consumption then increased and reached 1.9 litres in 1940 (just compare with the current 12 litres). During the war, consumption declined sharply, less alcohol was produced and all of it was used for medical purposes ( so the movies about inebriated attacks and boozing at the front is all a blatant lie!) After the war, in the early fifties, the consumption rate was 1.85 litres and our country was the soberest and developing faster than any other country in the world. After Stalin's murder, with the advent of the "communists" (Trotskyites who came instead of real bolsheviks) to power, there appeared the concept of an "alcohol budget", and from that moment our country flew into a terrible alcoholic abyss, reaching 14.2 litres per capita by 1985. In fact, the "alcohol budget" was not profitable. So, every ruble of 'profit' was discredited by 3-6 rubles of expenses (increased mortality, maintenance of prisoners, treatment of alcoholics, industrial accidents and traffic accidents, disability payments, maintenance of orphanages, etc.).
As you know, in 1985 we, in the USSR, had accepted an anti-alcohol decree, but everything was done in a half-hearted way (deliberately!). Some part of the population became dissatisfied, and instead of conducting explanations, anti-alcohol advertising and lectures, the so-called creative intelligentsia (artists, writers, directors and other representatives of the liberal democrats) screamed, shouted and pressed for Prohibition to be abolished. They cited "frightening figures" that in 1985 there were 11 thousand people poisoned by self-made alcohol, but they don't quote the statistics for 1984 when 19.500 people died of low-quality alcohol. In 1986 - 9.3 thousand, 1987 - 9 thousand, 1988 - 7.4 thousand (for comparison, in 1995, 38 thousand people (!) died of alcohol poisoning, according to official data, unofficially - 57-58 thousand, only in Russia (the USSR was dismembered into "principalities"), but creative intellectuals do not tell us about it, so who does "our" intelligentsia work for?) That is, there was a positive trend, but instead of continuing the sobering up of society, the "Royal" spirit was imported, and as our "beloved" Gorbachev used to say: "The process has begun! (in the year 2000 the level of consumption per one statistical person was 20 - 25 litres).
The so-called "economists" also say that the Treasury missed 39 million roubles because of the introduction of the anti-alcohol law, but those same "economists" dislike the fact that our coffers via savings banks received an additional 46 million roubles, people did not waste their money, they brought it to the savings banks. Consumption of goods and services also increased, which means that families started spending more on clothes, food, recreation and health (and so the trade won't lose from the prohibition, it will even win: it will take the money from the sale of other goods and services) and 500 thousand more children were born per year.
- If we analyse the curve of alcohol consumption per capita we find a terrible regularity - the number of alcoholics also increased, from 40th to 80th.
The number of alcoholics increased 14 times, the number of crimes under the influence increased 10 times, the number of accidents increased, mortality went up and the birth rate went down, but the curve went down as well. In 1985, the birth rate in our country "suddenly" went up, and in 1985 the death rate "suddenly" went down. But after the cancel of the anti-alcohol law and the introduction of Royal spirit, the birth and death curves crossed. But the worst thing: the result of this madness is that there is a progressive degeneration of the people. The percentage of mentally retarded children in the country has been increasing annually.
Let us now recall the definition of the word genocide.
Genocide is the extermination of certain population groups on racial, national, ethnic or religious grounds, and the deliberate creation of living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part, as well as measures to prevent births. International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) establishes international criminal liability for those responsible for genocide.