Evangelina Demina is a PhD Candidate at the University of Virginia, currently working on her dissertation on the literary history of narcotics in Russia.
Narcotics are one the last issues that comes to mind when we think about the Stalin era. There is a common belief that, after Stalinism had established itself in the 1930s, narcotics became a taboo topic. And indeed, Soviet authorities denied the very existence of a drug problem in the USSR and enforced a general silence about illicit drug consumption and trafficking, stigmatizing narcotics as alien to the Soviet “workers’ paradise.”
Very little data on drug addiction was available during the Stalin era. It seems that most Soviet sources were more concerned about the drug issue in capitalist countries which were allegedly infamous for various forms of drug addiction. Narcotics, however, were present in many literary works published during the Stalin years, including in ideologically acceptable literature.
Fiction from that period enlightens us about the true nature of the drug situation in the USSR, which was far more complex than its official portrayal. Rather than being a marginal or foreign phenomenon, the use of narcotics — meaning, habit-forming, predominantly illegal, psychoactive substances consumed for non-medical purposes to induce alterations in perception, cognition, mood, and behavior through their effects on the nervous system — permeated a wide range of social classes and contexts within the Soviet Union.
How narcotics were treated in literature the regime favored stood in stark contrast to other works that did not conform to the official cultural doctrine. The appearance of drugs in ideologically acceptable literature had a negative connotation that was often used to depict something alien to the Soviet ideal. A vivid example of this “othering” is Nikolai Ostrovskii’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934).
Narcotics in Ostrovskii’s novel reinforce the negative image of educated members of the “bourgeoisie,” who of course play the role of villain and oppose the positive heroes of Socialist Realism. Wealthy Nelly Leszczinska, the daughter of a Polish nobleman and attorney, contrasts with protagonist Pavel Korchagin, a man of humble origins who fights on the side of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. The narrator emphasizes Nelly’s expensive clothes and her use of cocaine (“her sensuous nostrils, so familiar with cocaine, flared”) — as does Pavel himself, in an even more derogatory terms. He resorts to a broad generalization, claiming that the Bolsheviks’ enemies will die out through their own degeneracy. “Who needs you, anyway?” he says to Nelly in disgust. “Cocaine will finish you off well before our sabers do.” Thus, for Ostrovskii, narcotics are a marker of sexual degeneracy, ethnic “otherness,” and ideological “alienness,” thus functioning as shorthand for the enemy.
It is difficult to imagine a more orthodox Stalinist text than How the Steel Was Tempered, but addictive drugs appear throughout works from the period, including among authors who were not in the regime’s favor. For instance, literature dedicated to Soviet labor camps features mentions of narcotics, although there was a palpable tension between ideologically acceptable works and those by writers who had spent significant time in the Gulag and were less than complimentary about the experience. The former category of author used narcotics to demonize drug-using labor camp prisoners as criminals with low morals and little allegiance to Soviet ideology, whereas the latter emphasized the pervasive presence of drugs within the camps, noting that their use extended beyond camp inmates.
For example, Nikolai Pogodin’s play “The Aristocrats” (1934) depicts labor-camp prisoners undergoing ideological reeducation or “reforging” (perekovka), with narcotics appearing at the play’s beginning to highlight the prisoners’ initial immorality. “The Aristocrats” became so popular that it was made into a film, Evgenii Cherviakov’s The Convicts (1936).
Narcotics make a literary appearance in the movie when a female convict sings a song with lyrics from the poem “Beaten, Broken Wings” (1936), which mentions cocaine. The poem was composed especially for the film by poet Sergei Alymov (1892-1948), himself a former inmate of Belbaltlag, the labor camp created in 1931 to build the White Sea-Baltic Canal. Alymov was no stranger to “reforging,” having been arrested for anti-Soviet activities but became a well-known songwriter and poet whose patriotic works celebrated the success of the Red Army and venerated Stalin.
The transformation that Alymov had to undergo to be integrated into the new Soviet canon recapitulates the differences between drug-related literature published in the Soviet Union versus in exile. Before his incarceration in the USSR, Alymov had lived in Harbin, China, where he published his collection of poems, A Kiosk of Tenderness (1920), which used drug metaphors to create expressive, hypnotic imagery. To compare Kiosk with a later work like “Beaten, Broken Wings” is to understand that Alymov had to revise his artistic style — and, perhaps, his stance toward drugs itself — to fit into Socialist Realism.
Although narcotics are not the main focus of attention for the unofficial works dedicated to the Gulag by such famous camp chroniclers as Evgeniia Ginzburg, Varlam Shalamov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the presence of drugs in their narratives demonstrates just how widespread drug addiction was, and how it penetrated all levels of the Gulag system. Although these authors’ works were not published during the Stalin era, they describe the realities of the period and thus help illuminate it. Works by Ginzburg, Shalamov, and Solzhenitsyn show high-ranking criminals (blatnye); labor camp doctors; and NKVD officers all taking different kinds of drugs, including marijuana (anasha) and cocaine. Psychoactive substances are deeply integrated into the Gulag byt (daily life) and regarded by users and observers alike as ordinary.
In contrast to the hostile treatment drugs received in the official literature of the Stalin years, influential émigré public figures developed their own culture in Europe with their own drug-themed literature. The vast majority of émigré writers treat narcotics in the context of obytovlenie, a term used to refer to commonplace drug use as routine or entertaining.
Two émigré works deserve special attention due to their innovative treatment of narcotics. One is Mikhail Ageev’s (born Mark Levy, 1898-1973) novella Novel with Cocaine (1934), which provides a comprehensive treatment of the protagonist’s addiction as a complex phenomenon with psychological, social, and spiritual aspects. The novella illustrates the devastating effect of narcotics on the confused adolescent mind, while simultaneously criticizing the new Soviet regime for simply ignoring addiction rather than considering it a social issue and a health concern requiring medical assistance.
Another contributor to the obytovlenie of drug use during the 1930s is Pyotr Ouspensky (Uspenskii)’s (1878-1947) philosophical work, A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method in its Application to Problems of Science (1931). Ouspensky was the first Russian philosopher to document his personal experiments on himself with narcotics. He claimed that drugs induced higher states of consciousness that allowed him to access the transcendental world and granted him access to powerful revelations and answers to metaphysical questions.
The literary works discussed in this essay shed light on the hidden history of narcotics during one of the most oppressive periods in Russian history. While the Soviet press, medical journals, and official literature stigmatized narcotics and used them as a negative marker for capitalist opponents, unofficial works produced a far more nuanced picture of drug use and abuse. During the 1930s and ’40s, narcotics became a crucial issue in Soviet and émigré written culture, including within fiction, nonfiction essay-writing, memoirs, and philosophy. The analysis of those drug-themed works exposes what official discourse sought to erase. Literature, both sanctioned and unofficial, became one of the few spaces where narcotics could appear at all, making drugs a part of the domestic cultural landscape.
By tracing how narcotics circulate through both official and unofficial texts, we gain a more multidimensional understanding of Soviet life under Stalin, in which drugs become a phenomenon that encapsulates conformity, resistance, and survival. Thus, drug-themed fiction serves as a crucial counter-archive preserving the hidden discourse of drug use and abuse.
