The Myth of Unrestrained Drunkenness: What and How Much They Really Drank in Rus’

Surely yes. Therefore, today we want to dispel the myth of eternally drunk Russians, which is believed not only by foreigners, but also by many Russians.

The tale of years past says that Prince Vladimir preferred Christianity to Islam due to the ban on alcohol. “To have fun in Rus’ is to drink, otherwise one will not live”, this phrase is often cited as an argument in favor of the fact that since time immemorial people have been drinking in Rus’, and neither people nor could aristocrats imagine life without it.

There is some truth in this: the common festivals of warriors and boyars happened really often. It’s just that such meetings were never considered a reason to “throw” to the position of dresses. Raising the bowl, the men said prayers, toasts and oaths – in fact, a meal which, according to legend, all deceased family members attended, took on sacred significance and turned into a ritual. .

Ordinary Russians, all the more, did not drink – the inhabitants of villages and villages spent all their time at work and walked only on vacation. Drinking alone or in a small company without an official reason was as unthinkable as going naked to the supermarket now. Anyone seen in this case immediately received the stigma of a strange or even a madman and became an outcast.

After the baptism of Rus’, little changed: for example, in the middle of the 16th century, the Lithuanian ambassador Mikhalon Litvin wrote in his treatise “On the customs of the Tatars, Lithuanians and Muscovites” that the Muscovites “s abstain from drunkenness, their towns are famous for their craftsmen. Only in the second half of the same century did a “Sovereign’s Tavern” appear in Moscow, where bread wine with a strength of 38 degrees was sold to the population, but there was no only one such institution.

Alcohol was first introduced to the Principality of Moscow by the Genoese in 1386. Having tasted the drink, the Muscovites declared it undrinkable – until the 15th century the “gift” was used exclusively as a medicine: the pharmacists drove it to make tinctures.

Do you remember the “honey beer” that ran down your mustache, but didn’t fit in your mouth? Drunk honey was very popular: two types of wine were made on its basis – put and boiled. The first was very expensive: a fermented mixture of berry juice and honey in a barrel was buried in the ground for 10-15 years. Boiled wine was simpler: honey was diluted with water, fruits and berries were added, boiled, cooled and left to ferment.

Another popular drink was kvass – a thick beer, from which the expression “sour” originated. In addition, ol, made on the basis of cereals with the addition of wormwood, was very close to modern beer. In the spring, birches were prepared from fermented birch sap. The strength of all these drinks was not high – up to 15-17 degrees.

Everything changed in the days of Peter I, who daily ordered to bring “a drink” to St. Petersburg builders, shipyard workers, soldiers and sailors. But even then, the extent of alcoholism in the villages was greatly exaggerated: as the 19th-century Russian publicist and agrochemist Alexander Engelhardt put it, “everything written in the newspapers about excessive drunkenness is written by correspondents, mainly civil servants, from cities. .”

So far, Russia has not even been among the ten most drinking countries – it is in 16th place, “losing” the first places to France, Germany, Portugal, the Republic Czech and other neighbors.