Foreign News: Bad Beer?

Comrade Leon Trotzky wasted no time on deploring the evils of good drink. Instead he cried to the municipal brewers: “Your beer is a disgrace! It is made with wild hops and rotten malt, and has been contaminated by the overflow from a dye factory. The Government has turned over to you the best breweries in Moscow. In them you make poison, while the breweries rented to private enterprises turn out good beer. You know I am fighting home-brewed vodka, and yet you produce worse than homebrewed beer. But you shan’t fool the public. I shall tell them not to buy your bad beer!”

Comrade Trotzky’s fight against vodka came to an abrupt end a day or two later; when the Soviet government reverted from partial prohibition to complete “wetness”, because it needed the revenues collectible from law abiding distillers of spirits.