Prohibitions and permissions in the "drinking" policy in pre-revolutionary and modern Russia

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the national alcohol policy in pre-revolutionary and modern Russia. The state's desire to gain a sustainable income to the Treasury from the constant demand for alcohol faced the need to preserve the health of the nation. Finding a balance between social needs and political ambitions was manifested in the introduction of restrictions regulating the distribution of alcohol. The aim of the study is the identification of the prohibitions and permissions in the sphere of the alcoholic products retail trade set in different historical periods and the determination of the vectors of these measures system. During the study the analysis of the Russian legislation of the 17th-19th centuries and the 21st century was conducted. These are the acts of the Supreme and Central state bodies of pre-revolutionary Russia, as well as federal legislative and sublegislative acts of the Russian Federation. The methodology of the article includes genetic and structural-functional approaches; techniques of analysis and synthesis; special formal-legal and comparative-historical techniques. Analysis of the Russian legislation of various historical periods gave an opportunity to identify various prohibitions and permissions in the alcohol sphere and divide them into multiple groups. The classification is based on territorial, price, quantity, time and subjective criteria. The similarity of the regulators of the retail sale of alcoholic products in different stages of the historical development of the Russian state is revealed. The trends in the historical dynamics of the limitations of the retail sale of alcoholic products in Russia are identified. The casual legislative pointing of the place of alcoholic drinks sale in pre-revolutionary Russia was replaced by the rules that define more general grounds of territorial restrictions. The time vector of the alcohol trade was modified: in Russia prior to 1917 there was a tendency to increase the time range, and in the Russian Federation to reduce it. The price limits changed, too: in pre-revolutionary Russian legislation the price of alcoholic drinks was clearly recorded, and in today's reality only the lower limit of prices is fixed. In the past and today the subject of legislative regulation is only the price of strong drinks, while beer is sold at free prices. Finally, the prohibitions on the sale of alcoholic drinks to minors that existed early in the history are now included in the general system of measures for the protection of minors as part of the state policy concept aimed at combating alcoholism in the population. A conclusion is made about the traditional character of state intervention in the alcoholic beverages market functioning. In modern legal reality there are conceptual approaches to the formation of the "drinking" policy, but it is only a step on the long way to the ideal model of a fair balance of public and private interest in the organization of a market for such a specific product like alcohol.

Keywords

Authors

References