A closer look
Russian imperial governments historically relied on state-sanctioned vodka monopolies to fund up to one-third of their entire military apparatus. The tsars quickly figured out that maintaining a total monopoly on the production and sale of highly addictive grain alcohol was a spectacularly efficient way to effortlessly tax a thoroughly miserable peasant population. Instead of implementing complex income taxes, the state simply supplied vast oceans of cheap booze and happily collected the astronomical profits while simultaneously keeping the working class too chronically inebriated to organize a proper rebellion. Building your entire national economic foundation on mass cirrhosis of the liver is certainly a wildly unethical strategy, but you really have to admire the bleak administrative efficiency
