Tobacco in Russian History and Culture

The Seventeenth Century to the Present

Matthew Romaniello, Tricia Starks, Matthew Romaniello, Tricia Starks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135842888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia rusa

According to the World Health Organization, approximately seventy percent of men and thirty percent of women in Russia smoke, and the WHO estimated that at the close of the twentieth century 280, 000 Russians died every year from smoking-related illnesses – a rate over three times higher than the global average. The demographic crisis in current Russia has occasioned interest by President Putin in health care efforts and by historians in the source of these problems. Tobacco in Russian History and Culture explores tobacco's role in Russian culture through a multidisciplinary approach starting with the growth of tobacco consumption from its first introduction in the seventeenth century until its pandemic status in the current post-Soviet health crisis.

The essays as a group emphasize the ways in which, from earliest contact, tobacco's status as a "foreign" commodity forced Russians to confront their national, political, and economic interests in its acceptance or rejection and find there markers of gender, class, or political identity. International contributors from the fields of history, literature, sociology, and economics fully present the dramatic impact of the weed called the "blossom from the womb of the daughter of Jezebel".

1 Tabak

An Introduction

Matthew P. Romaniello and Tricia Starks

During his 1698–1699 tenure as the Hapsburg secretary to Peter the Great’s court, Johann Georg Korb detailed the outrageous activities of the Russian court. In a highly sensationalistic account, he claimed to be privy to one of the tsar’s infamous, carnivalesque, religious ceremonies. Dedicated to Bacchus instead of the Christian God, the ceremony began with a procession of vice rather than virtue. Korb rapturously detailed the spectacle of servants parading forward with:

… great bowls full of wine, others mead, others again beer and brandy, that last joy of heated Bacchus…. they carried great dishes of dried tobacco leaves, with which, when ignited, they went to the remotest corners of the palace, exhaling those most delectable odors and most pleasant incense to Bacchus from their smutty jaws. Two of those pipes through which some people are pleased to puff smoke—a most empty fancy—being set crosswise, served the scenic bishop to confirm the rites of consecration.¹

Peter’s ceremony turned the conventional Russian Orthodox service on its head. Instead of the sacrificial host and sanctified wine, Peter ended his bacchanal with the use of tobacco smoke to consecrate the unholy rite. The smoke—like the ceremony it enhanced—was an attack upon the past and religious tradition. In the church, the smoke of incense wafted prayer up to the heavens on its wisps; in Petrine parody, tobacco smoke sinuously embraced the onlookers, penetrated them, and made them party to the sin and blasphemy of the host. Peter forced all those who came in contact with his smoke to experience for themselves a little taste of his grand, and aggressive, cultural mission.

Tobacco was far more than a simple accompaniment to Peter the Great’s amusements. With the embrace of tobacco, he toppled a ban that had been in place from tobacco’s first appearance inside Russia’s borders early in the seventeenth century. The Russian prohibition lasted almost the entire seventeenth century, staying in place for seventy years, longer than anywhere else in the world. Under the ban Muscovite authorities called for arguably the most severe penalties of any society, with increasingly harsh punishments—from beatings with the knout, to slitting of the nostrils, and even, most severely, the death penalty—for tobacco trade or use.²

Russia’s reaction to tobacco was unique. While most countries banned tobacco upon its arrival, they legalized it shortly thereafter, generally less than ten years after the initial prohibition. For example, the English East India Company began curing tobacco in its Indian factories in 1612, which inspired Emperor Jahangir to ban smoking in 1617. Profits from potential taxes, however, led the emperor to reverse the ban by the early 1620s, as the Indians adopted local tobacco production to reap the rewards of this new commodity.³ As detailed in Chapter 2, the Indian response was hardly unusual, which makes Russia’s seventy-year-long ban surprising. Cultural anxieties explain this difference in part. Tobacco, symbolizing both Russia’s newly-expanding presence in the emerging early modern global economy and the increasing foreign presence in Muscovy, was not a welcome guest. Muscovite Russia held a conflicted view of foreigners and their customs. When tobacco came to Russia, it only confirmed authorities’ worst suspicions rather than allaying them. Public disorder ensued, including the 1609 burning of a house in Iaroslavl’ from smoking.⁴ Reports soon reached Moscow of pervasive tobacco use in Siberia, resulting in large debts among the tsar’s military servitors. State authorities put forward their ban in 1627.⁵

Russia’s early opposition to tobacco was more than a worry over societal disorder. When Peter the Great overturned this longstanding ban, used tobacco in his private ceremonies, and strode through town puffing upon tobacco, spreading his rancor at the Church in the acrid clouds that followed him, he triumphed over the very things that had made others in Russian society wary. Peter saw in tobacco use the modern and the Western, but in his ceremonies it became something even more hazardous. Tobacco symbolized the transgressive and dangerous. By the 1640s, the Orthodox faithful reported visions of the Mother of God including warnings against the temptations and corruption of smoking.⁶ By the 1680s, the Russian Orthodox Church preached sermons against the evil intoxication produced by tobacco consumption.⁷ By the eighteenth century, Old Believers, who claimed to hew more closely to the Church’s traditions, depicted tobacco as an attack on Russian morals from outside forces. According to their legends, tobacco came from sin, an evil plant that had sprung up from the unhallowed ground of the grave of Jezebel’s daughter. They alleged that the Greeks then sent the weed to pervert the true Church.⁸ Russian Orthodoxy, the religion of state, did not hold a similar origin story for tobacco, though many of its officials criticized the Petrine regime’s embrace of Western culture, including the prominent role of tobacco.⁹

Peter used tobacco in his mocking ceremonies to offend Church ritual and taint onlookers, and while it is tempting to paint Peter the Great as a maverick and cultural crusader, he removed the ban with other interests in mind than a cultural campaign. Economic incentives figured heavily in both the longstanding prohibition of tobacco in Russia and also Peter’s overturning of the ban. During the seventeenth century, when Russia shunned tobacco, even though there was much resistance from the Church and society towards the weed, the action itself was largely for economic reasons. Tobacco was not performing well as a commodity. When Peter began allowing the tobacco trade in 1697, he did so in pursuit of profit, even though he certainly must have enjoyed the addition of tobacco to his revelries. By opening up the Russian tobacco market, Peter, and many others, held high hopes for massive earnings even as they took on a culture filled with opprobium for tobacco use.¹⁰

Peter the Great’s ceremony, its meanings, and its origins, highlight the major issues for tobacco in Russia not just in his time, but for the centuries to come. Tensions between economic and cultural missions continued to weave through the later history of tobacco in Russia. Tobacco use rose slowly through the eighteenth century and nineteenth centuries, with a precipitous increase in the late nineteenth century as a new form of tobacco delivery emerged with the papirosa—a Russian variation of the cigarette. Just as tobacco use developed, so too did the cultural opposition to tobacco. Religious opponents of tobacco were joined by new bourgeois authorities and anti-tobacco activists who brought medical, gendered, social, generational, and nationalist agendas to their arsenals in the cultural fight against tobacco. Over the course of the nineteenth, and then twentieth, centuries the economic boon of tobacco became more evident, but cultural, especially medical, critiques became more developed and sophisticated as well.

The essays in this volume follow the course of these multiple, conflicting agendas from the introduction of tobacco to the present day. The first four essays investigate the circumstances surrounding Russia’s singular, seventy-year-long prohibition of tobacco. The ban on tobacco importation emerged from the state’s realization that tobacco created only debt and no profit for anyone inside Russia’s borders. Cultural opposition played into the case against tobacco, as xenophobia, traditionalism, and distrust of foreign merchants energized the ban as well. As Matthew Romaniello argues, the tremendous reversal of Russia’s treatment of the tobacco trade under Peter the Great was a result of a transformation of Russia’s economic policies, not a decision about tobacco itself as a product or its moral danger. This transformation becomes only more noticeable when comparing the treatment of tobacco to that of another new, foreign commodity in the seventeenth century—rhubarb. Erika Monahan reveals, by contrasting the treatment of the two medicinally suspect and potentially profitable products, how truly exceptional the long-lasting prohibition against tobacco was.

Economic reasons for the tobacco taboo are reinforced with an examination of religious and medicinal materials from the period. In his essay, Nikolaos Chrissidis argues that even though Orthodox authorities outside of the country had already called for a condemnation of the product on moral grounds, the Russian Orthodox Church did not become actively involved in the debate over tobacco until the late seventeenth century. Chrissidis’s work suggests that as long as the state’s economic decision remained in force, the Church itself did not need to become involved. When the economic decision was reversed, so was the position of the Church. This transformation of the Church’s activities is paralleled in the medicinal issues raised by Eve Levin. Though tobacco began its life in Russia as a concern of the economic chancelleries, once it was officially adopted as a legal product, it became an anxiety for medical authorities. While there was no official consensus about tobacco in Russia, the debate over tobacco’s medicinal properties parallels this issue worldwide, even if occurring more than a century later than it began elsewhere. With each of these cases, cultural issues were merely ancillary to the economic decision of the state, even though the public was more likely aware of the moral and medicinal fears than the tsar’s economic concerns.

As Peter the Great’s ceremony makes clear, the morality of tobacco use—as well as its Western associations—were already in play by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As the next set of essays reveals, the cultural and political associations of tobacco were becoming more articulated and were now joined by inferences regarding class, order, and societal problems. Konstantin Klioutchkine examines Russian literature and the attitudes therein towards tobacco, social rank, and the transformation of society during the era of Alexander II (1855–1881) and his Great Reforms. Snuff symbolized the “old” social elites; cigarettes reflected changing attitudes of the new “modern” society. The more tobacco became associated with change, the more the traditionalists in Russia condemned its use. Roy R. Robson argues that the Russian Orthodox Old Believers focused on tobacco as a symbol of pollution and corruption, which both continued a religious debate more than two centuries old, and provided new reasons for supporting a fundamental rejection of modern society. Others embraced tobacco as an element of the modern. Playing with the concept of a social divide created by tobacco use, Sally West shows that tobacco manufacturers and advertisers exploited the association of tobacco and modern society to encourage sales to late imperial society. Advertisements end up revealing as much about Russian social values and class distinctions as they do about marketing. While in Robson’s essay rejection of tobacco serves to mark inclusion in a closed community, in both Klioutchkine and West’s essays, tobacco consumption serves as a marker of gender and status. Some eschewed tobacco, but many more would use tobacco consumption to show their inclusion in an even greater community—the modern, the forward-thinking, the revolutionary, and the young.

Against the background of rising consumption and a booming market for tobacco products, more and more important for both the state and business interests, Tricia Starks details both the rise, and the ineffectiveness, of anti-smoking initiatives at the turn of the twentieth century. The joint opinions of religious and medical authorities made few inroads against consumers, producers, and advertisers, and were not effective in convincing the state to work against its short-term economic interests. With the Bolshevik takeover, tobacco’s dangers received serious attention, but their proposed, national tobacco initiative, so neatly in accordance with Soviet concerns about the health of the new Soviet citizen, was resoundingly rejected by the economic authorities of the Soviet Union. Even a Communist economy was not free from market pressures. As Robson, West, and Starks uncover the persistence of cultural and medical concerns, Iurii Bokarev’s statistical study examines a transitioning economy struggling to meet Russia’s soaring demands. Bokarev details the increasing centralization of tobacco production to satisfy the growing demands of a modern, industrial society. Nearly three centuries after tobacco’s arrival, these essays demonstrate that no one had yet presented an argument that could settle the debate as to whether tobacco represented a drain or a boon to the state.

If even a Communist state hostile to tobacco could not overcome its lure, it is not surprising to see widespread smoking among all members of Soviet society, including its children. As Catriona Kelly uncovers in her essay on childhood smoking, Soviet authorities primarily looked the other way while society encouraged smoking by boys as an essential aspect of their maturation into full-fledged members of society. It was obviously a long way from the century-long prohibition of the seventeenth century. While anti-smoking advocates had difficulty, Karen F.A. Fox shows that such efforts did continue throughout the Soviet period. These further campaigns, however, were largely limited and never assessed for success or reception. Examination of the major waves of propaganda from the early 1920s and 1930s, and later in the 1970s, reveals a public health campaign that used consistent imagery to educate Russians on the dangers of tobacco, yet these were health marketing campaigns that never succumbed to innovation or even research on effectiveness.

The tension between halfhearted tobacco prohibitions and increasing consumption reflects the long, uneven history of tobacco’s place in Soviet society. In fact, much of the twentieth century was defined by a Soviet and a post-Soviet scramble to keep society amply supplied for its tobacco habits. Elizaveta Gorchakova relates the view of Soviet-era tobacco producers through the experiences of the head of Russia’s largest tobacco firm, Iava. His experience reveals the tremendous political and cultural pressures for tobacco production to be increased rather than a push against tobacco consumption. Even as the rest of the world turned against smoking, the director of Iava struggled to meet larger and larger state quotas. Soviet anti-smoking efforts were weak in comparison to the all-out push for increased yield that the state demanded of tobacco producers. These pressures on tobacco companies to perform continued well after the state began counter-initiatives against its own products by flirting with warning labels in the late 1970s. As Mary Neuburger reveals, international research and warning labels did little to staunch demand, and supplies would continually be a problem. During the Cold War, Eastern European ally Bulgaria supplied the Russian tobacco market with products produced with Western technology and following international tastes. This Western influence occurred with the tacit approval of Soviet authorities. Tobacco consumption, apparently, trumped Cold War tensions.

In the post-Soviet era the overwhelming presence of foreign tobacco producers and Western-style marketing, has complicated the scene, as has the increasing evidence of a demographic crisis in Russia. Anna Gilmore looks at one of the major suppliers of tobacco in post-Soviet Russia, the British American Tobacco Company. While it has been increasingly common for public health officials in Russia to blame the current incidence of smoking on foreign advertisers, the history of tobacco clearly demonstrates that this is not a new problem, regardless of the companies involved. Gilmore’s data clearly demonstrates tobacco consumption was and is on a continuous rise in Russia.

Today, Russia has become the third highest per capita smoking country in the world and tobacco use is a deadly cla...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Tabak: An Introduction
• 2 Muscovy’s Extraordinary Ban on Tobacco
• 3 Sex, Drink, and Drugs: Tobacco in Seventeenth-Century Russia
• 4 Tobacco and Health in Early Modern Russia
• 5 Regulating Virtue and Vice: Controlling Commodities in Early Modern Siberia
• 6 “I Smoke, Therefore I Think”: Tobacco as Liberation in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• 7 Smokescreens: Tobacco Manufacturers’ Projections of Class and Gender in Late Imperial Russian Advertising
• 8 Tobacco Prohibitions as Ritual Language
• 9 Papirosy, Smoking, and the Anti-Cigarette Movement
• 10 Tobacco Production in Russia: The Transition to Communism
• 11 “The lads indulged themselves, they used to smoke…”: Tobacco and Children’s Culture in Twentieth-Century Russia
• 12 “Tobacco Is Poison!”: Soviet-Era Anti-Smoking Posters
• 13 The Iava Tobacco Factory from the 1960s to the early 1990s: An Interview with the Former Director, Leonid Iakovlevich Sinel’nikov
• 14 Smokes for Big Brother: Bulgaria, the USSR, and the Politics of Tobacco in the Cold War
• 15 Tobacco and Transition: The Advent of Transnational Tobacco Companies
• 16 Up in Smoke? The Politics and Health Impact of Tobacco in Today’s Russia
• Contributors