A Revolutionary Attack on Tobacco: Bolshevik Antismoking Campaigns in the 1920s

Abstract

Using archival records of the Commissariat of Public Health, journals, and propaganda materials from the antismoking campaign of the Soviet 1920s, this article argues that the revolutionary state pursued an antitobacco policy unique in the world in its attack on tobacco use at a national scale. The commissar of public health, Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko, attempted to severely curtail tobacco cultivation and production, limit tobacco sales, and create a public opinion against tobacco with a propaganda campaign. Even in failing in its farther-reaching goals, the policy proved one of the most forward in terms of antismoking propaganda and state-sponsored treatment regimens, with the distribution of antismoking posters, pamphlets, articles, plays, and films as well as the creation of special state-sponsored smoking-cessation programs that boasted high success rates.

After the February Revolution of 1917, which installed the Provisional Government upon the still-smoldering rubble of the Romanov autocracy, the exiled Bolshevik Vladimir Iliich Lenin began a trek across war-torn Europe to join his voice to those calling for change. Ushered along his way by the German government, who saw no downside in ridding their own territories of radicals while stocking up the Russian state with even more, Lenin steamed through hostile territories, sealed off in a special train car with artificially constructed borders of chalk lines manned by German guards. As the train passed through the fields of one war, Lenin fired the first salvo in a battle that few had anticipated—an attack upon tobacco.

It was no secret that Lenin abhorred smoking, but many of his revolutionary colleagues embraced the habit. So the “old man” created a set of rules for their floating isle of Russian soil—tobacco use would only be allowed in the bathrooms. Soon enough the bathrooms became clogged with people using them for this unintended purpose, leading to bickering. Lenin stepped in, issuing “tickets” for the bathrooms of two classes—for smokers and for users. For every three “legitimate” uses of the premise, he issued one “smoking” ticket, and thus smoothed over the difficulties his smoke-free zone had made for the denizens of the sealed train.

The arguments over smoking by the Bolshevik leadership would not be restricted to the nominally Russian soil of the train wagons.¹ In the years that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Lenin continued to push against tobacco. At the meetings of the main governing body, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, Lenin exiled the smokers to the area around the chimney where they could exhale their smoke up the flue, thus penalizing them by pushing smokers away from the center of decision-making. He mocked them as “smoking cockroaches” to boot.²

Lenin’s tobacco stance tended to be largely for his personal comfort. However, he found a comrade-in-arms for a broader fight against smoking throughout Soviet society in Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko, the leader for the newly created Commissariat for Public Health (a top-level government institution similar to a ministry of health and known by the acronym Narkomzdrav). Semashko came to his position as a man of both Marxist and medical knowledge. He joined a Marxist circle at Moscow University in 1893 and was exiled for his activities in 1895. Afterward, he completed medical school in Kazan. By 1917, he had entered the revolutionary firmament.³ After assuming his post at the head of the commissariat in 1918, through an ill-fated legislative push in 1920, and onward through the 1920s until he left his post in 1930, Semashko undertook a campaign against tobacco unprecedented in the world for its intended scope and, even in failure, notable for its exceptional outcomes.

BACKGROUND TO THE CAMPAIGN

Although Lenin and the Bolsheviks brought the first communist government to the world, they were not the first to attempt antitobacco legislation in Russia. Indeed, Russia had the distinction of having maintained the longest ban in the world against the weed. For some 70 years, until the overturn of the ban in 1698 by Peter the Great, the Russian state had resisted the importation, sale, and use of tobacco, exacting heavy punishments on those who transgressed, including beatings, slitting of nostrils, and even threats of death.⁴ Even as Peter reversed the ban, religious, medical, and moral arguments grew to increasing prominence over the course of the late 17th, and into the 18th and 19th centuries. By the late 19th century, opponents condemned tobacco use as sin, poison, or an impetus to poor behaviors.⁵ The author Lev Tolstoy argued that tobacco opened the gateway to disgraceful conduct, even murder.⁶ Medical authors focused on tobacco’s nicotine, isolated in 1828, as a poison of the body and the will that brought on neurasthenic complications and social problems from criminality to sexual impotence.⁷

Papirosy Produced in traditional form, currently available in Russia. Photo from author’s collection.

Despite the support of Lenin and the early entrance of Russians into the antitobacco sphere, the attack on smoking would not be an easy one for Semashko. The challenges were enormous: compared with most parts of the world, Russians indulged earlier in a more powerful form of nicotine delivery and consumed tobacco of higher nicotine content.

RUSSIA’S UNIQUE IMPERIAL TOBACCO CULTURE

Russians switched earlier than most of the world from the use of snuff and cigars to the inhalation of tobacco smoke through cigarettes, which were used in greater and greater numbers throughout the 19th century. Russians produced a unique form of cigarette called a papirosa, which was a hollow, cardboard tube mouthpiece affixed to a tissue paper–wrapped “cartridge” of tobacco (see the image on this page).⁸ By 1914, 49.5% of all tobacco processed in Russia came out as papirosy. By 1922 to 1923, that percentage reached 83.2%.⁹ By comparison, cigarettes first constituted half of total tobacco production in Britain in 1920, in the United States in 1941, and in France in 1943.¹⁰ The early transfer of the tobacco market to papirosy might hold significance for health outcomes as deeply inhaling smoke creates circumstances for more addictive use than consumption with pipes or cigars.¹¹ In any case, contemporary observers of Russia in the revolutionary era estimated that almost every urban Russian male consumed about a pack a day.¹²

In a large proportion of those papirosy, the tobacco was a “harsh and sour” Russian and Ukrainian species called makhorka (Nicotiana rustica). This species, brought by Sir Walter Raleigh from the New World, had been superseded in many of the world’s markets by the “mild, sweet” Nicotiana tabacum of Virginia.¹³ In the decades preceding the revolution, however, makhorka represented a large proportion of Russian cigarettes—both taxed production and unrecorded, untaxed, local output. With a rougher taste and stronger smell and containing up to twice as much nicotine as other tobacco, makhorka became an emblem of Russian difference and imparted an exceptional smoking experience.¹⁴ This increased nicotine content may have added to the addictive qualities of Russian tobacco as much as the method of delivery.¹⁵

DISCUSSING A BAN

The intensity, mounting use, and consequently increasing visibility of Russian tobacco, along with an established tradition of antitobacco and general temperance actions by the state, set the stage for a new push. Lenin struck the match when, according to Semashko’s memoirs, he prompted, “Why not start a fight with that weed tobacco? I will support you.”¹⁶ Urged on by Lenin, in December 1920 Semashko attacked a routine proposal to shore up the tobacco market at a small planning-committee meeting of the Soviet of People’s Commissars (known by the acronym Sovnarkom), the cabinet of advisors to Lenin, and set actions in motion. He argued, from a global Marxist perspective, that tobacco production and export was antithetical to the mission of a Bolshevik government as it poisoned not just thier own working class, but the working class around the world. Semashko was put in charge of a special two-week commission made up of representatives from agriculture, trade, the national economy, and eventually worker unions for “the investigation of the question of the danger of tobacco and the possibility of gradual measures for diminishing and in the future destroying that culture.”¹⁷

Over the next two weeks, the commission met to discuss the question.¹⁸ The records noted “complete opposition” and debate of a “very volatile character.” Semashko pushed forward, eventually producing a 10-point plan for attacking tobacco with provisions including forbidding the importation of tobacco raw materials from abroad, fighting tobacco speculation, restricting those younger than 21 years or nonsmokers from receiving tobacco ration cards in the civilian population and in the Red Army, forbidding smoking in public areas and therapeutic institutions, and developing an “energetic agitation” against tobacco.¹⁹ Some of the inspiration for these points came from abroad. In the files of the Commissariat of Health, hand-written notes about German provisions accompany the file on the Semashko effort.²⁰

Taken together, Semashko’s proposals would have been a bold attack on tobacco. Growth and production would be radically curtailed. Tobacco would become a product available only to those who already smoked. Prohibitions on smoking in social spaces would have limited exposure for nonsmokers, and an “energetic” campaign of antismoking propaganda would have supported these measures by building public perceptions of tobacco’s dangers. Certainly, many of these would have suffered on implementation, but their encompassing nature evidenced the seriousness with which the commissar of health regarded the danger.

KILLING THE BAN

Although notes of the commission’s 10-point plan record no protests from industry and trade representatives, when Semashko presented his decree on February 3, 1921, for implementation, they all pushed back. The economic arguments for tobacco won out against Semashko’s points about health, leading to the tabling of the points regarding limiting agriculture, production, and trade. The protocol ends with the decree being transferred not to the planning committee but to the larger meeting of the Sovnarkom after a reworking.²¹ Semashko recalled that after the meeting he confronted Lenin, rebuking him for his lack of support. Lenin, however, said that it was Semashko who had folded, denying any responsibility for the proposal’s failure. In the end, Semashko removed the decree from discussion at the Sovnarkom meeting of July 1, 1921.²²

Semashko might have lost in 1920, but there were still agitators reliving the battle. In a 1922 collection of antitobacco works, health commentator I. A. Pridonov wrote approvingly of the effort to eliminate smoking. He lamented, however, that the campaign seemed limited to Narkomzdrav’s popular education and lectures from the War-Sanitary Authority, the prime health unit for the military. He argued that the government must move forcefully to remove “temptation” and attempt to “close all tobacco factories and diminish the provision of tobacco within the population as well as in the army.” Pridonov acknowledged that this might be too much for some, but at the very least tobacco must be kept from children and smoking should be eliminated from social spaces, including hospitals, markets, and railroad facilities. In addition, smoking rooms should be added to segregate smokers when possible.²³ Other authors similarly called for prohibition.²⁴

Some antitobacco authors disliked bans, finding them authoritarian and ineffective. Before the revolution, many of Russia’s cessationists had balked at banning tobacco, arguing that authoritarian methods were at best unsuccessful and at worst counterproductive. They pushed back against any idea of coercive state methods from both an evidentiary standpoint and a likely distaste for autocratic intrusions. The prolific health author Ivan Vasil’evich Sazhin, for example, noted that the draconian policies of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (ruled 1645–1676) had done nothing to eliminate smoking. Slitting nostrils, flogging, and threatening execution did not dissuade people. As he reasoned,

It is not the point that tobacco and spirits are sold, but it is that they are wanted, searched for, paid for, and with not a little money. With that end we must begin. Here and for in general building a new life, we must begin with cultural revolution.²⁵

This was a sentiment that drove policy as well as rhetoric. A November 14, 1920, effort to stop smoking in some hospitals ran into a distaste for prohibition and added regulation. The protocol of a meeting of the War-Sanitary Authority of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic contained the report of a commission that had been called to look into the question of tobacco’s negative effect on hospitals. The commission concluded that no further regulation was needed to fight tobacco in hospitals, as sanitary enlightenment work was already “organized and reasonable.” Instead of putting forward further decrees, the commission was urged to look into better organization of the informational push by working with Glavsanupra, a major division of Narkomzdrav, and the Military and Naval Inspection groups.²⁶ Lectures and other agitational moves were, however, to be undertaken.²⁷ The failure of the commission should not come as a major surprise. Even the Moscow Department of Public Health lagged in implementing a prohibition. They did not forbid smoking in their own institutions until 1926, when they imposed a stiff fine of 50 kopeks per papirosa.²⁸

Prohibition sentiment prevailed only in arguments regarding youth smoking, but even here it was tempered. The Soviet youth groups—the Komsomol and Pioneers—included antitobacco propaganda in their mission from the start and made this part of their behavioral requirements for the construction of the new cultured life.²⁹ Still, the fact that prohibitions of tobacco among youths were reported as news suggested that it was rare for institutions to forbid youths to smoke. For instance, a piece in the journal Bednota in 1921 regarding the prohibition of smoking at schools in Kazan of the first and second level, as well as in kindergartens and nurseries, would imply that even these institutions had some trouble securing smoke-free areas. Although the aim was likely to deter smoking by teachers and staff in such institutions rather than students, it did reach the higher-age school levels where smoking often initiated. Importantly, even this action was reported as proposed rather than implemented.³⁰

THE ALCOHOL EXPERIENCE

Arguments against tobacco prohibition were undoubtedly influenced by the experiences of first the tsarist and then the Soviet government with alcohol prohibition. Nicholas II prohibited alcohol in 1914 in an attempt to forestall the widespread drunkenness that had met mobilization for the Russo-Japanese War in 1904.³¹ Recognizing the pressures of bootlegging, as well as the widespread consumption of alcohol substitutes (cologne, lacquer, etc.), in 1917 the Provisional Government relaxed prohibition, retaining it only for strong drink. Starting in 1921, the Soviets gradually liberalized liquor prohibitions, eventually reinstituting legal production of full-strength vodka in 1925. Increased consumption followed.³²

Semashko opposed alcohol just as he had tobacco, but because prohibition temporarily took the problem from his shoulders it was not until 1922 that he came forward forcibly on the issue. In a 1922 commentary for the newspaper Izvestiia, he argued that fiscal issues could not trump those of popular health.³³ Furthermore, in this essay and elsewhere, he argued for the dependency of socialist development on the physical health of the Soviet population. For Semashko, the Soviet state could not triumph without a healthy population because without healthy citizens no one could build the utopian future. Unfortunately, the Soviets would have to build utopias with the situation they had rather than the idealized progression Marx envisaged. Economic interests stymied Semashko’s antialcohol crusade—first those of Lenin and then in 1925 a similar set of arguments from Stalin. With prohibition overturned, the heavy revenue stream that the production of spirits brought to the state effectively blotted out attacks on alcohol. Alcohol proved especially profitable; by 1927 to 1928, almost half of the state’s collected excise taxes came from sales of spirits, amounting to 12% of all state revenues.³⁴

REVOLUTION AND PROPHYLAXIS

The economic cases put forth for continued production of tobacco in 1920 to 1921 and renewed production of alcoholic products from 1922 to 1925 did not stop Semashko’s fight with these products, but it would push cessation efforts under the umbrella of Narkomzdrav’s general hygienic, prophylactic propaganda. Like the state itself, torn between the poles of economic viability and ideological purity, Narkomzdrav had been no stranger to the vagaries of funding since its foundation in 1918. Semashko faced a nearly impossible task—the revival of the health of a population devastated by war, famine, civil war, and epidemic disease and plagued by an ongoing shortage of trained medical personnel and supplies. In the first days of the Commissariat, fights for simple hygienic measures to combat louse-borne typhus ate up time and resources. Decreasing agricultural yields, the virtual standstill in industry, and the consequent mass depopulation of the cities exacerbated by civil war and drought in 1920 to 1921 forced Lenin to change course with the institution of the New Economic Policy in March 1921. The New Economic Policy quelled social discontent and allowed a reintroduction of small-scale capitalist development in the hopes of bringing industrial and agricultural production back up to prewar levels, but for health it proved a devastating setback.

Narkomzdrav faced first an environment of scarcity and horrific disease, and then, in 1921, a system in which accountability, expenditures, and cost-effectiveness ruled. Faced with difficult problems and little resources to alleviate them, the slogan that came to rule Semashko’s efforts made a great deal of sense: “The protection of the health of workers is the responsibility of workers themselves.” Semashko pushed an agenda of prophylactic care in which fighting for health was an individual battle taken for the collective good. Although many nations of the period saw health as a national resource, the Soviet program under Semashko undertook the utopian goal of a perfected socialist society emerging through the personal maintenance of health. Additionally, Narkomzdrav conveyed its message to the people through use of the wide-ranging propaganda techniques that had helped spread the Soviet state’s political agenda to the public during the revolutionary period.

PROPHYLACTIC PROPAGANDA

Although the reliance on prophylactic messages backed by worker self-help, propaganda, and volunteers all pointed to Narkomzdrav’s weakness in terms of resources, the resulting cacophony of appeals appeared anything but weak. The ubiquity, variety, and ingenuity struck observers as new, exciting, and unavoidable.³⁵ Foreigners visiting the Soviet state were convinced that the new health service and its methods represented the future.³⁶ Pamphlets, posters, slogans, and lectures flooded the population with information on the new life and how one should behave, live, work, and rest to bring it into being. Additionally, the Soviets experimented with more innovative means of health messaging. Museums, traveling displays, and sandwich board exhibits met people throughout the cities. In workers’ clubs, lectures and agitation plays conveyed new lifestyle messages, as did films, slideshows, and factory newsletters.

Propaganda proved one of the most pervasive activities of Narkomzdrav. The dependence on propaganda demonstrated the Bolsheviks’ strong faith in the transformative power of knowledge—and especially science—for society, their dependence on prophylactic efforts as a primary form of health care, and their belief in the power of rational ideas to transform behaviors.³⁷ Messages of health surrounded the Soviet citizen and centered on creating new behaviors that were considered more balanced, rational, and progressive while uprooting those considered backward, individualistic (in the sense of selfish), and irrational. Despite the austerity of the war years, between 1919 and 1922 the state published over 13 million pieces of public health materials, and pamphlet literature and poster production picked up over the decade to address with growing concern the entirety of Soviet health, including tobacco use.³⁸

Antitobacco advocate Popov decried the lack of antitobacco materials in his 1926 pamphlet, but a wave of publications came out that same year as part of the general campaign to create a “New Soviet Lifestyle.”³⁹ Posters from this period—such as the image “Quit Smoking! It’s Paper-Wrapped Poison,” based on a couplet by the revolutionary poet Vladimir Maiakovskii—appeared with greater frequency (see the image on this page). Some 10 000 copies were distributed, and at 12 by 18 inches the posters fit easily in clubs, on shop floors, in stairwells, and in offices. Semashko thus led a vast propaganda enterprise as the head of a higher, more centralized, bureaucratic institution than any other tobacco cessation advocate in the world. No other program at the time came close to the strength of the Soviet antitobacco force. As a Soviet ideologue, Semashko pushed programs to fight tobacco that emphasized rational appeals regarding societal dangers, collective responsibilities, and communal benefits, and the message was trumpeted everywhere.⁴⁰

“Stop Your Smoking: It’s Paper-Wrapped Poison!” Gosmedizdat, 1926–1929. Ten thousand of these posters were printed at the time. Courtesy of the Russian State Library.

INNOVATIVE CESSATION THERAPY

In addition to innovative delivery of health care propaganda, the Soviets also instituted a ground-breaking, state-controlled tobacco treatment program emanating from the tuberculosis treatment dispensary system. Officials of the Moscow Region Health Department, often at the forefront of new public health initiatives, developed specialized narkodispensary devoted to treatment of abuse of alcohol and other intoxicants. ⁴¹ The narkodispensary propagated an innovative treatment that used the latest psychological theories and techniques alongside social support groups, regimented therapies, and occasionally guided suggestion. In the early days of its existence in 1924, the tobacco control dispensary registered 30 to 40 people a month, but this figure soon climbed to nearly a thousand a month.⁴² Smokers so inundated the dispensaries that in 1925 authorities had to shut down individual therapy and instead use mass therapy and limit admission to tuberculosis patients. In mass therapy, groups of 50 to 80 people would be treated to lectures and introduced to the concepts of directed suggestion, allowing the therapists to reach more people. To extend work even further, the dispensary connected to circles of motivated smokers at workplaces or through institutions like the communist youth groups. Using the concepts of Russian physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, researchers conceptualized smoking as a reflex that could be responsive to environmental cues. They therefore included nonsmoking workspaces to enhance the program. The dispensaries, with worker cells attached, claimed an astonishing success rate of 40% to 50%.⁴³ Other reports gave a more equivocal, even mocking, appraisal of the efforts.⁴⁴

CONCLUSIONS

The national program of tobacco cessation activities championed by Semashko, seen in the profusion of antitobacco propaganda and activities, and implemented on the local level through innovative programs like the narkodispensary, placed the Soviet state at the forefront of tobacco cessation activities. Although Semashko failed in his attack on tobacco’s cultivation and production, the propaganda that he and others created and the new treatment programs introduced became part of a war on smoking as a great social evil with political, economic, cultural, and generational harms. Despite Semashko’s downfall at the beginning of the 1930s, the attitudes and ideas seeded in this propaganda continued to be part of advice to women, youths, and athletes especially, and maintained visibility on a national platform for decades to come.

The sealed train of Germany had carried not only political and social radicals but also pioneers in the fight for tobacco cessation. Yet, this early Soviet fight against tobacco was not repeated in the postwar era. The statistical studies of the 1950s and the actions of British and US medical authorities in the 1960s were not met with similar efforts by the Soviet state until the late 1970s. The early history of Soviet antitobacco efforts did not auger a radical attitude toward tobacco cessation in later eras, and the long-term consequences of waiting for action were anything but revolutionary.