Vladimir I. Lenin, one of the two main leaders of the Bolshevik party, a nonsmoker, was intolerant toward tobacco. Starks reports the hilarious but telling story of
Lenin selling bathroom tickets to Bolsheviks who wanted to smoke during meetings. Lenin seriously wished to ban tobacco and reduce access to it. In 1917, tobacco had been linked to lip and mouth cancers and to heart palpitations, but these suspicions were overpowered by the beliefs that it caused digestive problems, mental incapacities, weakened will, weakened heart, and sexual debilities in men and women, and that it inflicted collective harms on morality. Smoking was also blamed for its
cost to individuals and society resulting from lost worker productivity, smoking-related fires, and exposure to nonsmokers in crowded housing and smoky social spaces. Bottom line:
tobacco was a threat to the Revolution.
However, despite all his influence and the support of the Health Minister Nikolai Semashko, Lenin failed to impose any material, economic limitations to the production and sale of papyrosa in the first years of the Soviet Union. The opposition, both political and economic, was too strong. The health authorities were not even able to ban positive views of tobacco in advertising, popular literature, and movies.
Unable to restrict access to tobacco products, Lenin and Semashko were left with propaganda, which they used abundantly, as their only option to fight tobacco consumption. Its success is hard to assess but, according to Starks, Soviet appeals were everywhere, including testimony from workers that it inspired to try to quit.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5637694/
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