Cigarettes and Soviets: Smoking in the USSR

"This book belongs to a genre of historical nonfiction which I think is very much worth encouraging and that is the history of everyday life. We have, perhaps, too much history focusing on the leaders, the führers , the kings, the military dictators, and the big events in history. But that’s not what people’s lives consist of. When you take a topic like this, you are suddenly looking at things which you think you know from a very different angle. This gives you a new perspective and makes your world picture more complex. I would compare Cigarettes and Soviets to a book which I read in Russian recently, and which I liked very much. It’s the history of Soviet shops called Torgsin or ‘trade with foreigners,’ which existed for a few years in the 1930s. Most Russian readers know about it from certain excerpts in The Master and Margarita where the heroes, the Devil’s assistants, come to one of those glittering luxury shops and burn it down. This book was a work of economic history and it suddenly showed what Soviet industrialization was all about. Torgsin was a mechanism for squeezing things out of hungry people—like jewellery, gold, or czarist money which they might have hoarded—and making them trade it for flour to make bread, for example. That was then turned into hard currency that was given to the West in exchange for industrial equipment and machinery for the Soviet army. It’s like seeing a person’s skeleton. Once see it, you cannot un-see it. That’s what comes from studying these little details like Torgsin, which is not on the front page of your history book. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The same applies to Cigarettes and Soviets . Soviet society was very much given to smoking. Even after Soviet times, we Russians still smoke more than comparable societies in Europe or North America. The Soviets were not much into preventing people from smoking. Until very late, there were hardly any anti-tobacco campaigns. On the contrary, there was a campaign to make people smoke, because that was how the state made profits. The same applied to the state encouraging people to drink because the state profited from the vodka trade. It seems innocent. It may be comic, because the book has all those old Soviet ads, telling people how great it is to smoke a cigarette. But behind this, you see a very, very cannibalistic state. Again, once you see it, you can’t un-see it and once you understand it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere. Yes, he did not create a tradition in this respect. Nobody listened to him. That was his personal preference, but when the state needs to make money, nobody’s tastes are taken into account, not even the General Secretary’s."