Samogon
사모곤
A strong home-distilled spirit illicitly produced across the Soviet Union from whatever fermentable materials were at hand (potatoes, grain, sugar beets, or fruit) using homemade stills. Samogon was a deeply embedded feature of Soviet informal life that persisted under the state vodka monopoly, and its production surged during the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign when official liquor sales were slashed, triggering a nationwide sugar shortage as households turned to home distilling. Long after the campaign receded, samogon endured as the countryside's primary source of hard alcohol and a medium of barter, a persistent feature of Soviet life filling the gap between plan and market.
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Sources
- Wikipedia (RU) definition, etymology, and legal status of samogon in the USSR (1948 criminal penalties, 2002 decriminalization in Russia)
- Wikipedia (EN) samogon consumption during the 1985–1988 Gorbachev campaign, with ~23% of the population engaged in production; sugar sales rose 18% due to home distilling
- in-formality.com Global Informality Project entry on samogon as medium of informal exchange (blat, pomoch') and peasant tradition, by Mark Lawrence Schrad, Villanova University
- pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Bhattacharya, Gathmann & Miller (2013): samogon estimation via excess sugar sales, its role in offsetting official alcohol reduction during the campaign