Alcohol: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Posters

by Fuel, Alexei Plutser-Sarno (Contributor), Damon Murray (Editor)

Soviet propaganda against the demon drink: the latest in Fuel's Russian pop culture series
From the acclaimed authors of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedias and Soviet Space Dogs comes Alcohol, a glorious and exhaustive collection of previously unpublished Soviet anti-alcohol posters. The book includes examples from the 1960s through to the 1980s, but focuses on posters produced during Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign initiated in 1985. These posters attempted to sober up Soviet citizens by forcing them to confront the issues associated with excessive alcohol consumption. This government-led urgency allowed the poster designers to present the anti-alcohol message in the most graphic terms: they depicted drunks literally trapped inside the bottle or being strangled by "the green snake." Their protagonists are paralytic freeloaders and shirkers who always neglect their families, drive under the influence, produce substandard work, are smashed when pregnant and present a constant danger to fellow citizens. A two-part essay by renowned cultural historian Alexei Plutser-Sarno attempts to explain, from a Russian perspective, the reasons behind this phenomenon.

Genres: History, Art, Russia, Nonfiction

248 pages, Hardcover

First published April 25, 2017

Reviews

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite an interesting display of anti alcohol/ prohibition propaganda posters for 80s Russia. Interesting to see what lengths and ways the government try to control and deter the vicious drinking behaviour of its people with questionable success.

[Michael Holdsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insight into the Soviet drinking culture and the Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign.

[Bert · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the two essays enveloping this excellent collection of prohibition propaganda, Plutser-Sarno offers what soon turns out to be a partly first-hand (p. 16) account of the political and cultural causes and consequences of excessive drinking in the Soviet Union. Beginning his opening exposé with an incisive overview of Gorbachev-era prohibition measures (pp. 6-11) and an impressive listing of alcoholic substitutes (pp. 11-22), and in the closing text referencing numerous sayings, jokes, and literary works (pp. 230-245), he ultimately seems to conclude that "Russians' attitudes to their own drinking habits are both blithe and fatalistic" (p. 233). Nevertheless, one can't help but feel that the Russian adage "if you don't drink or smoke, you'll die healthy" (p. 233) sounds like an almost pleasant conservative contrast to Friedrich Nietzsche's increasingly apt diagnosis that "man honours health" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, first part, § 5).