Ya spending 10 hours a day in bread lines and starving and millions dying in war meant nothing.
I left highschool with the vague impression that the Russian Revolution happened because the people were overwhelmingly embarrassed that their Tzar was getting cuckolded by Rasputin.
He doesn't assert that it played a greater role than material conditions anywhere as far as I can tell, but that prohibition was a contributing factor (which I find it hard to argue against).
I mean, prohobition surely is a material condition in itself, like the material conditions for bootlegging gangs or the drug trade involves prohobition making it more profitable.
The inflation that led up to the revolution was certainly part of the material conditions, and throwing out almost a third of your state revenue is something that will affect inflation.
material conditions
Taking away that homologous to what marx called 'opium of the masses,' is a shift in material conditions.
If being drunk all the time was what caused communism, wouldn't England have gone communist during the gin craze?
Yeah that's some shit. It's sort of like blaming the ending of the British Empire on gin rations.
that domino meme where the tiny domino says "pepsi is imported" and the big one "Yeltsin cancels USSR"
exchange for Pepsi
This proves that pepsi is the drink of the proletariat
The Russian revolution started when women workers who didn't have food for themselves or their children went on strike and took to the streets of Leningrad (named St. Petersburg back then) demanding bread. I don't think vodka was high on their list of concerns.
I feel like it's an aspect that could be interesting to analyse, Russians do drink a lot of vodka and, like the Romans making their plumbing out of lead, that undoubtedly has had some effect on their history and society, but it's absurdly reductive and incredibly insulting to try and cast vodka consumption as the primary driving factor in Russian history and politics over the last century and a half.
i mean, banning vodka certainly did not improve public opinion of him.
yeah we all know america turned into a communist utopia after prohibition right?
