Question 6.—How do you reconcile Vodka monopoly with struggle against alcoholism?
Answer.—I think that it is difficult to reconcile them; one goes certainly against the other. The Party is aware of this, and it took up this policy deliberately knowing full well that at present such a seeming contradiction is the lesser of the evils. When we introduced the vodka monopoly we were confronted with the alternative: EITHER creep under the capitalist yoke by ceding to capitalists a whole number of our most important works and factories, receiving from them in return the necessary means to get out of our temporary difficulty; OR introduce the vodka monopoly in order to get the necessary revenue for the development of our industry with our own resources. The members of the CC, including myself, had a talk with Lenin, who admitted that in the event of not getting the necessary credits from outside the vodka monopoly was inevitable as a provisional means of an extraordinary kind. This is how matters stood when we were introducing the vodka monopoly.
Of course, generally speaking, it would be better without vodka, for vodka is an evil. But in that case it meant creeping under the yoke of capitalism, which is a still greater evil. Therefore we preferred the lesser evil. At present the revenue from vodka is, over 500 million roubles. To give up now the vodka monopoly means to give up this revenue. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that this would lessen alcoholism, for the peasants will begin to distil their own vodka and to poison themselves with this inferior home-distilled stuff. In this respect the great cultural backwardness of our countryside evidently plays a certain rôle, apart from the fact that giving up the vodka monopoly is tantamount to depriving our industry of over half a billion roubles which cannot be derived from any other source.
Does this mean that the vodka monopoly is to stay with us for ever? Certainly not, we introduced it as a provisional measure. Therefore it must be abolished as soon as we discover in our national economy new sources of revenue for the further development of our
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