Bolsheviks and the Bottle: Drink and Worker Culture in St. Petersburg, 1900-1929 (review)

Laura Phillips identifies her major themes and conclusions concisely: “In three broad areas, Russian culture proved particularly impervious to revolutionary change: in the meaning attached to cultural symbols, in leisure forms and associations, and in gender relations” (p. 140). She rests these broad assertions on her narrower investigation into workers’ drinking practices. Both before and after the revolution, drinking was a collective enterprise, gendered male, and was most closely associated with holidays and paydays. These findings are not particularly surprising—why should a mere revolution alter deeply engrained drinking practices? Still, it is interesting that the drinking culture not only withstood assaults by temperance activists, but also survived a decade of dormancy after 1914, when either no spirits at all or no vodka were legally available and when in consequence, Phillips argues, drinking did decline significantly. At the first opportunity, Russian workers reverted to traditional drinking forms.

Phillips adroitly traces the conflict between traditional drinking and the Soviet regime’s values. Workers were willing to give up the religious holidays that had been favored occasions for drink, but only because they could celebrate the new Soviet holidays in the traditional manner, to the chagrin of Soviet officials. Workers were massively unwilling to accept the values of the “conscious,” ideologically committed worker that the regime attempted to instill; the regime’s conception of the sober, well groomed and well spoken worker violated notions of masculinity that workers refused to give up. Workers also showed in the way they drank that they refused to accept the gender equality that the regime proclaimed. Furthermore, suggests Phillips, many workers believed that it was their own traditional cultural practices that the revolution had endorsed, because the revolution was officially theirs. Phillips provides a good deal of evidence that in their skirmishes over drinking space (traditional drinking spilled over into new clubs) and drinking behavior, workers asserted their prerogatives as workers to do as they thought proper.

The only traditional drinking rituals that, according to Phillips, workers did give up after the revolution were work-related. After the revolution, newly hired workers no longer had to buy a round of drinks for their mates, and they no longer drank in honor of their bosses. Although she does not fully work out the argument, Phillips is almost certainly right that radical changes in hiring practices and factory hierarchies eliminated the social contexts in which these rituals were functional. Her explanation for the apparent reduction of drinking on the job is less convincing. She asserts that this is evidence of an increasing division between work and leisure, which she sets in the context of new uses of leisure time: movies, radio, theater. However, if there was markedly less drinking on the shop floor, that was probably due chiefly to better policing, because—as Phillips shows—there was still a great deal of drinking in out of the way corners during work breaks.

I myself do not believe that, considered as a whole, workers’ use of leisure time changed substantially during the 1920’s. Perhaps workers did go to the theater more often (or theater was brought to them at clubs), and any time spent with the radio was a new leisure occupation. Movies were a well-established form of urban entertainment before the revolution (100,000,000 tickets were sold in 1910), but probably workers went to movies (or movies were brought to them) more frequently in 1924 than in 1914. The preponderance of the evidence is that workers’ use of leisure changed very little in the decade after the revolution, and that they used the great bulk of their leisure time socializing with each other, the traditional Russian leisure practice. The first systematic time budget study, conducted by Stanislav Strumilin in the winter of 1923—24, for instance, found that workers spent almost all of what he called leisure time socializing at home or on the street, and almost as...