Editor’s Note: Cross-posted from the Study Forum.
From: American Journal of Public Health
A Revolutionary Attack on Tobacco: Bolshevik Antismoking Campaigns in the 1920s
Tricia A. Starks PhD
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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
