Prince EUGENE TRUBETSKOI.
Moscow, October 7, (20,) 1914.
How Prohibition Came to Russia
Interview with the Peasant-Born Millionaire Reformer, Tchelisheff.
[By the Associated Press.]
PETROGRAD, Nov. 18.—There is prohibition in Russia today, prohibition which means that not a drop of vodka, whisky, brandy, gin, or any other strong liquor is obtainable from one end to the other of a territory populated by 130,000,000 people and covering one-sixth of the habitable globe.
The story of how strong drink has been utterly banished from the Russian Empire was related by Michael Demitrovitch Tchelisheff, the man directly responsible for putting an end to Russia's great vice, the vodka habit.
It should be said in the beginning that the word prohibition in Russia must be taken literally. Its use does not imply a partially successful attempt to curtail the consumption of liquor resulting in drinking in secret places, the abuse of medical licenses and general evasion and subterfuge. It does mean that a vast population who consumed $1,000,000,000 worth of vodka a year; whose ordinary condition has been described by Russians themselves as ranging from a slight degree of stimulation upward, has been lifted almost in one day from a drunken inertia to sobriety.
On that day when the mobilization of the Russian Army began, special policemen visited every public place where vodka is sold, locked up the supply of the liquor, and placed on the shop the imperial seal. Since the manufacture and sale of vodka is a Government monopoly in Russia, it is not a difficult thing to enforce prohibition.