“The scourge of all Soviet Russia is cocaine,” Tatiana Kuranina, a Russian noblewoman, wrote sometime after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. “Although Russia is reduced to a state of complete impoverishment and needs decisively everything – there is cocaine, and there is enough for everyone…”
Many in the West today imagine the Soviet Union as it’s portrayed in Call of Duty games: a land of prisons and labor camps, where every citizen marched to the tune of the Party and its all-seeing security state. In truth, there were many aspects of Soviet life that the Soviet government failed to control, from the import of Western film and music to the sale and consumption of illegal drugs.
Just how widespread the latter was is difficult to say. While the War on Drugs in the US has filled a library’s worth of books, studies, articles, and documentaries, the USSR spent much of its existence pretending that substance abuse was a thing of the bourgeois past, cured by the healing powers of Communism. But was there really enough cocaine for everyone?
Drug of choice
In czarist times, definitely not. Back then, alcohol was Russia’s drug of choice – courtesy of a state monopoly on vodka sales that dates back to the late medieval reign of Ivan the Terrible. Where European and American doctors prescribed narcotics for nearly everything from toothaches to hay fever, their Russian counterparts judiciously reserved the strong, addictive stuff for true medical emergencies. It also helped that for a large portion of the 19th century, Russia counted just 14 pharmacies, limiting demand by way of supply.
Supply increased when the Russian Empire ventured into Central Asia, exposing its population to Chinese opium and Indian hashish. Bans on alcohol and tobacco, implemented during the First World War and maintained throughout the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, set many in search of alternatives. As in Europe, soldiers became addicted to the medications they were given after being wounded on the battlefield, while civilians turned to drugs to escape their war-torn realities.
As drug abuse increased, so did efforts to understand and combat its causes. Before the Soviets came to power, addiction of any kind was considered a kind of moral failing, resulting first and foremost from a lack of decency and self-control. Under Communist rule, experts began to look at the problem through a Marxist lens. Addiction – then called “narcotism” or “narcomania” – was blamed not on a person’s character, but the material circumstances in which they grew up.
“The basis of narcotism,” one Soviet doctor wrote in 1923, “is the socio-economic conditions of the public. On this basis arises the necessity to forget, to become numbed with something (…) difficult economic conditions do not permit ‘corrective’ substances to play their role: tea, coffee, small doses of wine or beer will not satisfy.” Another doctor wrote of a group of boys who began snorting cocaine not because they were bored, but because it made them feel like they “did not need to eat.”
Marxist narcology
During the 1920s, the Soviet Union’s policy on illegal drugs was equal parts punitive and preventative. The government reasserted control over the country’s handful of pharmacies, tightened rules on the prescription and storage of narcotics, and made drug dealing of any kind and quantity punishable by multiple years of jailtime. Not prohibited, to the chagrin of some and presumably the relief of others, was the consumption of hashish.
This period also saw the rise of rehabilitation clinics. Inspired by the sanitoria that treated people afflicted with syphilis, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases, these clinics (“narco-health centers,” early Soviet rehab facilities) temporarily isolated addicts from the outside world and its bad influences. Now-questionable treatments, including subcutaneous injections of arsenic and strychnine – both highly toxic – coexisted alongside more reasonable-sounding interventions like warm baths, psychotherapy, and supervised museum trips. Clinics for underage addicts had their patients follow structured daily regimens, with two hours of bedrest after lunchtime.
What little data there is available suggests that drug abuse in the Soviet Union fell during the 1930s, but can those numbers really be trusted? By this time, Joseph Stalin had taken over, and many of the USSR’s early attempts to tackle societal issues in earnest had given way to sycophancy and propaganda: one medical text touted that while Europe’s exploited factory workers continued to numb their sorrows with drugs, the Soviet state had “nearly liquidated” its narcotic woes – all thanks, of course, to its “wise” Stalinist leadership.
Under Stalin, a fan of forced labor, plans were drawn up to replace clinics with workshops. Aside from medication and entertainment, addicts were to be given jobs and monthly quotas, just like any other member of society. They would still receive various forms of therapy – hydro, psycho, and more – “but the basic therapy,” as one historian put it, “was work,” the purpose of which was to “contribute to the Soviet economy” as much as the recovery of the patient.
Rifles and reefers
The effects of the Thaw – a period of relaxed censorship following Stalin’s death in 1953 – did not extend to discourse on illicit drugs, and scientific writing on the subject remained sparse for many more years to come. Not until Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous glasnost and perestroika campaign of the mid-eighties, further curtailing censorship along with corruption, did drug use begin to receive the kind of public attention it had enjoyed in the years immediately following the Civil War.
According to a research memo from the CIA, Gorbachev’s administration turned drug addiction from a non-issue into a national issue, one that required increased awareness and mass mobilization to solve. After decades of virtual silence, narcotics were talked about everywhere, from medical conferences to youth newspapers. “Soon the poppy harvest will start pouring into the city,” a concerned mother wrote in a letter to the editor of a periodical, her tone as ominous as Princess Tatiana’s.
The CIA memo claimed that drug addiction in the USSR was on the up – a development it attributed, among other things, to a “general waning” of ideological belief and public morale, more leisure time and disposable income paired with sustained consumer shortages, and greater contact with the West, whose own drug habits “have given impetus [to] Soviet youth infatuated with Western trends and fashions.”
Gorbachev’s equally fervent campaign against alcoholism – driving up prices and reducing availability – is also listed as a likely factor, promoting drug use in the same way that prohibitions had done at the start of the century. This time, young Russians were turning to poppy extract, paint thinner, and prescription medication.
Finally, there was the Afghan-Soviet War, unleashed in 1979 when the USSR invaded Afghanistan to help its struggling communist government stave off an Islamist insurgency. If the memo is to be believed, drug abuse among Soviet troops stationed in the country reached “epidemic proportions.” There was evidence that drugs were impacting the soldiers’ performance, and fear that – when sent home – they would take their bad habits back with them.
Sources claimed that as many as 50% of soldiers habitually used hashish and heroin. Both were readily available in the bazaars of Kabul and other Afghan cities, and were considerably cheaper than alcoholic beverages – important considerations as, unlike decorated officers, regular conscripts did not receive a monthly alcohol allowance. Worse, a liter of vodka was said to cost as much as an entire month’s wages.
Reports of soldiers trading their military equipment for drugs, or accepting drugs as bribes from locals seeking to cross checkpoints, or helicopter pilots crashing their vehicles because they took too many opiates, were so common that the Soviet army tried to pressure the Afghan government into eliminating its own supply. When this proved futile, the army promised instead to incarcerate anyone who was caught swapping their rifle for a reefer.
Putin’s total war
Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the Soviet state ultimately led to its demise. The political and economic turmoil that followed the collapse of the USSR in 1991 provided a golden opportunity for all manner of criminal activity in Russia, the drug trade included. Some criminals were so successful, they joined the ranks of Russia’s new ruling class: the oligarchs.
Regrettably, ascertaining the scale and scope of Russia’s drug problem remains as difficult as it was in Soviet times. As then, many of the agencies and research institutions that gather information on the topic are under strict government control. The same question returns: can the numbers be trusted?
One organization, the Russian Civil Society Mechanism for Monitoring of Drug Policy Reforms, suggests the answer is “no.” As early as 2015, a year into the Russian occupation of Crimea, it filed a complaint with the UN that characterized the Kremlin’s drug policy as overly reliant on punitive restrictions, indifferent to human rights, and anti-scientific.
More so than his Soviet predecessors, Vladimir Putin and his followers have turned drug addiction from an economic and public health issue into a political one. Where the Soviets regarded addicts as victims of poverty and hardship, Putin’s state rhetoric often frames addiction in punitive, moralized terms, pairing enforcement with political messaging in ways that can blur public health goals and state power.
As in the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte or the US under pretty much every president from Richard Nixon onward, drug war frameworks can function as a tool of domestic control: expanding police powers, intensifying surveillance, and normalizing harsh punishments. Whatever the stated intent, the effect is often the same: fear becomes policy, and enforcement becomes a stage on which states demonstrate strength. It’s a logic Stalin would have surely approved of.
Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #644463 / Yuriy Somov / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
