Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2015 number

The article deals with the problem of alcoholism among the urban population of the Tambov province during the period of modernization in the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries. The article reviews contemporary Russian scholarship on this problem. The author studies alcoholism of the urban society based on the statistical data, archival sources, and press materials. Drunkenness is considered as a form of deviation, interconnected with other manifestations of deviant behavior - suicide, bullying, murder. The article discusses the forms of control over drinking exercised by the state and church. During the period under study drunkenness being one of the most common social ills remained a big problem for the post-reform urban society and required serious attention from the government and public institutions. Drunkenness of urban residents hampered the normal development of urban environment and often served as a catalyst for more serious manifestations of deviant behavior and crime. In the cities of the Tambov province, much more affected by modernization as opposed to the villages, the problem of alcoholism was sharper than in the uyezds. As compared to other regions of Russia, the Tambov province suffered much from the problem of drunkenness among its urban residents. The scale of alcohol abuse in this case also correlated with the degree of penetration of the modernization of the urban life in society. The problem of drinking in the Tambov province was much more serious than in the neighboring cities of agrarian provinces, however the situation was even worse in the cities of central regions that were more affected by modernization. The growth of population’s alcoholization is inevitable during the periods of modernization. It was a price to pay for the increase in the urban population, the influx of workers to the cities. However, it did not relieve the State and the society of their responsibility to fight against this evil.