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Article Excerpt
Public drinking has aroused long-lasting debates in St. Petersburg/ Leningrad and Helsinki. Taverns, pubs, restaurants but also streets and parks as well as workplaces in the city have been the main arenas of public drinking. My central concern is the impact of policy and police regimes on public drinking. The state was heavily involved in controlling public drinking in both cities; it simultaneously monopolized and regulated the alcohol trade and condemned drunkenness. The suppression of public drinking places was common for both cities. Still, the high number of arrests for public drunkenness in open spaces and the growth of total consumption indicate that drinkers moved to open urban spaces or to private places. Police control of the public spaces and the weakening role of the licensed drinking facilities as a place for neighborhood clientele affected the sociability of drinking and the uses of public space in general.
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Public drinking has aroused long-lasting debates in St. Petersburg/ Leningrad and Helsinki since the 19th century. Questions about drinking and disorderly drinking reflect larger political, cultural and social concerns. Since early times people have celebrated, relaxed or suffered with alcohol in various places in the city, both public and private. Taverns, pubs, restaurants but also streets and parks as well as workplaces in the city have been the main arenas of public drinking. Gender and social class also strongly influence the times, locations, forms and rituals of drinking. Since pre-industrial times the state has intervened to regulate and control public drinking, affecting its format. Public drinking is therefore a complex phenomenon with numerous variables. My central concern is the impact of policy and police regimes on public drinking. During the interwar period the state was heavily involved in controlling public drinking in both Leningrad and Helsinki; it simultaneously monopolized and regulated the alcohol trade and condemned drunkenness. What were the results of this policy in two different systems, one communist, the other capitalist? How was public drinking controlled, and how did it affect the uses of public space? Did the regulation of drinking facilities increase drinking in other public places such as streets or other illicit places? What were the parallels and differences between the two cities? A key aim of this paper is to look at the development in public drinking and its control in the two cities from a historical perspective.
Helsinki and St. Petersburg/Leningrad (1) were chosen for this study because they are major Baltic cities, both principal centers, with strong historic connections. There are important parallels and divergences between them. Both have expanded rapidly in the period since World War I. At the beginning of the 20th century, St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia till the October Revolution, had been transformed from a planned and orderly imperial capital into an industrial city with a substantial worker population and visible social problems. The radical politics after the revolution, with the nationalization of the economy and strict prohibition of private trade, brought immense problems to Russian cities. The collapse of the national and urban economy resulted in famine and massive, unprecedented migration to the countryside. In 1917 Petrograd housed 2.5 million people and in 1920 only 0.7 million. With the introduction of New Economic Policy (NEP) the situation stabilized and the city started to regain its population. Still, in the last years of the NEP Soviet Leningrad must have looked still much more "capitalist" than was expected ten years earlier; the reurbanization and the more relaxed economic rules brought the commercial activities back to the cities. The first five-year plan initiated by Stalin again created troubles--private activities were suppressed and food rationing was introduced in 1930. Nevertheless, cities fared better than the countryside, and Soviet Leningrad was growing rapidly; by the end of the study period it already had over three million inhabitants. Helsinki, after 1917 the capital of an independent Finland, was significantly smaller than St. Petersburg/ Leningrad, with about 160,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the 1920s. Helsinki recovered from the Finnish civil war and economically fared rather well, but the rapid tempo of urbanization created problems with, for example, housing. In 1939 the city already had 258,000 inhabitants. The mechanisms for controlling drinking were often similar in the two cities, from licensing of bars and taverns to the police control of drunkenness in the open city spaces. At the same time, the actual implementation of control had important differences, since in Leningrad the various police and security agencies had significantly greater powers over society in general than in Helsinki.
Drinking is a culturally defined--action the same drinking activities can be regarded as acceptable or unacceptable in different times and places. At the beginning of the studied period there was a growing gap in both countries in attitudes to drinking by the authorities and by a large part of the urban population. This can be seen in the large number of arrests and wide use of alcohol despite the prohibitions. "Irrational" or even harmful ways of spending time by drinking fitted poorly into the picture of the new modernizing economy and of the ideologies of the new states. Ways of drinking had to be changed. Along with authoritarian methods, states turned to more productive ways of fighting drinking. State authorities tried to educate and "civilize" new urban dwellers by educational temperance propaganda and by providing alternative attractions for leisure. They tried to replace alcohol by reading and theater, and pints in the beer halls by cups of tea at the workers' clubs. The process could be interpreted as a variation of the "civilizing process." (2) By replacing the spaces of unwanted activities with new alternative spaces such as sports grounds and clubs, people would also change their ways of behavior and reject the traditional, now "backward" forms of leisure with alcohol. The planned urban environment was given a significant role in both countries. Still, when private space was scarce due to housing crises, public spaces had an increased importance as venues for recreation and also for unwanted activities such as drinking. Along with open public spaces, such as streets, parks and squares, urban public space also contains commercial spaces. While this commercial space, such as bars and restaurants, can be included in public space, its role belongs somewhere between public and private; the spaces were publicly accessible but privately managed. Taverns and other drinking places formed an arena for traditional cultural activities, which created a significant part of the "social space" of cities. By regulating or closing down commercial places and by controlling drunkenness on the streets, the authorities also influenced the ways in which urban public space was used and shaped.
There are many studies about Finnish alcohol policies, the temperance movement, drinking habits and so on, to which the Helsinki part of my study is indebted in many ways. (3) Soviet/ Russian historical alcohol studies have been less developed, but in the recent years important works about Soviet alcohol policies have started to appear. (4) Because Soviet alcohol policy is perhaps less familiar than the Finnish, it is described here in more detail. Still, despite the geographical proximity, there are no comparative studies about drinking in Helsinki and Leningrad with a long time-scale. In studies with a historical dimension, Finland has usually been compared with Scandinavian countries. Different political and economic systems in Helsinki and in Leningrad do indeed make comparison very complex. In the Soviet Union the state strongly intervened in all sectors of society, including trade and consumption. There were several changes in the Soviet alcohol policies in the 1920s, while Finland maintained prohibition 1919-1932. Cultural changes were nevertheless slower than political ones, so it is especially interesting to study how different control measures affected the ways of public drinking in the two cities.
Alcohol policies and drinking habits in the city
There were many parallels in the culture of drinking in Finland and in Russia at the beginning of the period as well as in the authorities' attitude to drinking. In both cities strong liquor was the main drink. Alcohol was not part of daily life, but a way to get a break from it. Drinking had a seasonal character, and especially in Russia was connected with religious holidays. In addition to its sporadic temporal features, in the cities public drinking was concentrated spatially, usually in the working-class areas. (5) It is likely that the seasonality of drinking, the "ritualized" outbreaks of public drinking were an important factor in creating demands for control and change of drinking habits. The drinking habits of the majority of the population in both cities were mostly regarded as "uncivilized" and "backward," and drinking as a problem that had to be controlled by the state.
On the other hand, at the beginning of the study period the total consumption of alcohol was low in both countries. (6) Journalist Vladimir Mikhnevich argued back in 1886 that while Russian ways of drinking were hard and caused noise and arrests, people drank rarely, and the level of consumption was lower than in Western Europe. Drinking problems in the city were therefore more "qualitative than quantitative." (7) Finnish temperance activists formulated similar views about disorderly Finnish drinking habits and a "bad booze head," despite very low consumption. (8) Alcoholism was definitely a problem and caused enormous problems to the families involved, but the role given to public drinking and taverns as a producer of various social problems was often overstated. Still, in both Soviet Russia and independent Finland the strictest control methods, such as the total prohibition of alcohol, were adopted.
The temperance movement had already grown strong in Finland in the period of autonomy in the Russian Empire. All political parties except the Swedish People's party favored prohibition in the 1907 elections. Temperance movements had developed in Russia, too, despite narrower political freedoms; it had 8,000 temperance societies with 500,000 members by 1912. Socialist parties also strongly supported prohibition. The tsarist state had built a profitable alcohol monopoly, but at the outbreak of World War I it nevertheless declared a...
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