The publication, in 1990, of David Christian's “Living Water”: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation, inaugurated a period of intensive scrutiny of the role of alcohol in modern Russian history. In English, at least three monographs have appeared in the past eight years alone, including Laura Phillips's book on working-class drinking cultures before and after the revolution and Patricia Herlihy's study of the battle against alcohol in the late imperial period, as well as the book presently under review. In Russian, V.K. Dmitriev's classic 1911 analysis of Russian alcohol consumption was reissued with annotation in 2001, and substantial discussions of alcohol and temperance have appeared in such broader works as N.B. Lebina's Povsednevnaia zhizn' sovetskogo goroda. 1920/1930 gody (1999). Centered, like most of its predecessors, on the last two decades of imperial Russia and the first decade of the Soviet era, Kate Transchel's new monograph not surprisingly covers some of the same territory as these other works. Its major original contributions are to chronicle the postrevolutionary temperance movement and to trace the cultural construction of alcohol from the Revolution to the “Great Break.”

Transchel's discussion of the late imperial period revolves around the tension between the imperial state's reliance on vodka revenues and social reformers' campaign to eradicate drunkenness. This tension has been something of a constant in modern Russian history, with the exception of Russia's brief experiment with Prohibition during the First World War; particularly during the late imperial period, it put reformers in a difficult position, as social criticism of drunkenness so easily shaded into political criticism of the government that profited from Russians' proclivity for drink. Drunkenness, moreover, was a striking feature of both rural and urban drinking cultures, with the difference that rural drinking tended to take the form of communal binges around holidays and life-cycle rituals, while urban working-class drinking was structured by the workweek and paydays. Middle-class temperance activists, themselves rarely teetotallers, considered both of these drinking cultures benighted and sought to replace traditional sociability in the tavern with such “cultured” diversions as going to the cinema, reading, or singing in a “Sober Choir.” Alternatively, medical practitioners adopted the notion of “alcoholism” to distinguish between a chronic problem and the periodic binges of rural life.

In a somewhat modified form, these two approaches to alcohol resurfaced in the 1920s in the form of a rivalry between social hygienists and psychiatrists. Transchel offers an informative overview of this contest. Social hygienists advanced the thesis that alcoholism was a social ill, whose sources lay in poverty, illiteracy, and custom, while psychiatrists characterized it as a form of individual mental illness. Not surprisingly, given the broader trend away from collectivism in the cultural politics of the late 1920s, it was the psychiatrists who came out ahead. Transchel traces a similar shift in anti-alcohol propaganda in the second half of the 1920s in an engaging chapter entitled “Demon Vodka”; whereas the anti-alcohol poems, exhibitions, posters, and feuilletons of the first years after the Revolution portrayed drunks as so many victims of the oppressive old order, the mock trials and poems of the “Great Break” period cast alcoholics as enemies.

Students of working-class history will be disappointed at the brevity of Transchel's treatment of their theme. Its subtitle notwithstanding, Under the Influence devotes just two short chapters to workers' actual drinking habits. Like Laura Phillips, Transchel notes the importance of alcohol in assimilating new workers into the established shop-floor culture of the prerevolutionary period. Phillips, however, argues for the demise of prerevolutionary drinking customs, even while alcohol remained an important component of postrevolutionary factory life, and she also identifies gender as the main intraclass fissure that alcohol opened up. Transchel, by contrast, highlights elements of continuity between Russia's preindustrial drinking culture and the postrevolutionary industrial order, and at the same time interprets Soviet drinking patterns as evidence of an emergent class division between “veteran” workers (here equated, somewhat problematically, with both “skilled” and “vanguard” workers) allied with recently-promoted managers, and the recent immigrants from the villages. The influx of peasants into the urban workforce during the First Five-Year Plan (and, for that matter, 1895–1914) is familiar to all historians of modern Russia, who have debated its impact on urban society and politics for decades. Transchel adduces some new evidence in support of the image of a deeply divided working class (e.g. the statistical bureau's conclusion that unskilled workers drank nearly half again as much as skilled workers), but her discussion is too cursory to make much of an impact on this debate.

With respect to its overall aims and utility, Transchel's book is something of a hybrid. Evidently hoping to reach a broader audience, the author provides background information about Russian history that specialists are likely to find superfluous. With regard to its primary topic, however, it does not provide the kind of comprehensive, synthetic treatment of alcohol that would recommend it for use in the undergraduate classroom. That said, Transchel contributes to the ongoing discussion of alcohol and its meanings for Russian society under tsarist and Soviet rule, and specialists will want to read it.