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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Tolstoy was an aristocrat and most people commenting here are functionally in the same position; that is, largely able to choose which substances they consume - or choose not to consume them at all.

This is not the case for the vast majority of alcohol use throughout history. Historically, for lower class professions like farmers or factory workers, drinking was just something you did. It was something your father did, and his father did, etc. It was an inherited cultural trait, not a decision that an individual ruminated over.

Adding to that were exploitative practices against these workers by the providers of alcohol, in a way not dissimilar to the recent opioid crisis.

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Peasants in Russia (and in Poland-Lithuania before it got conquered) were effectively slaves. They had to do free work, couldn't leave without permission of the landlord. Landlords were also acting as judges.

Landlords had monopoly on producing and selling alcohol, and they extracted as much additional income from that as they could. Which meant each of them had an inn which he rented out to someone. The inn was buying landlord's alcohol and encouraging or forcing peasants to buy it.

It was a common trick to have "all you can drink" passes for farmers. There were even attempts to force peasants to buy if they didn't wanted to - by introducing quotas and they had to pay for the whole amount even if they drank less.

When it comes to Slavic countries before 20th century - think American South before civil war, just both slaves and slave owners are white.

What you're describing is serfdom, and it was in some aspects similar to slavery, but still distinct. Serfs could not be sold to another landlord, they had obligations towards the landlord, but were not a simple commodity.

Serfdom was also widely present in Europe, not unique to Slavic countries at all.

> Serfs could not be sold to another landlord

They could in Russia. And when direct trade and trade with land were eventually prohibited, they were "rented out" to the same effect.

There were great differences between the legal status of serf in western europe versus eastern, at least after the black death. This is due to the fact that western europe experienced a serious labor shortage after the black death wiped out a good part of society. This paradoxically put serfs in position where their labor was desperately needed and they could leverage this to gain legal recognition This difference is said to be one of the reasons why the industrial revolution started in western europe and why it took much longer for eastern europe and russia to industrialize.

Wow, this is a hugely reductionist and patronizing take. You really think there weren’t lower class people choosing not to drink, or to drink less?

I’m hoping you might simply be biased by the fact that most of what we know about history, and even in more recent times most of what gets mindshare, comes from the upper class.

For one, many religious movements across the world preached against alcohol use - and while you can argue in some cases the doctrine was set by the upper classes, that doesn’t hold as much water when looking at the many popular Protestant movements which were pretty grassroots. Temperance in the US was hugely driven by middle and working class women, not just elites. And alcohol use was highly controlled by such elitist movements as Leninist Russia.

The temperance movement was limited to a fairly small percentage of Christians and only began in the 19th century.

> Throughout the first 1,800 years of Church history, Christians generally consumed alcoholic beverages as a common part of everyday life and used "the fruit of the vine" in their central rite—the Eucharist or Lord's Supper. They held that both the Bible and Christian tradition taught that alcohol is a gift from God that makes life more joyous, but that over-indulgence leading to drunkenness is sinful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_alcohol

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