Kalash and cannons in exchange for the Solntsedar from Algeria
Twenty degrees "in the shade"
Fortified wine "Solntsedar" was one of the Soviet memes. Solntsedar is a very small village near Gelendzhik. Since this is a wine-growing region, many people naively thought that this poison was made from wine material from local vineyards. However, they were gravely mistaken.
"Solntsedar" was indeed produced at a local winery, but the raw materials for it were supplied from Algeria. By barter in exchange for weapons and infrastructure, because Algeria, as you know, achieved independence from France in 1962 and immediately found itself among the candidates for joining the socialist camp.
In the USSR at that time, Nikita Khrushchev ruled, who, for his constant trips to third world countries, was called "Nikita the Traveler" (this is in addition to the more famous nickname "Nikita Kukuruznik"). Khrushchev at one time did not disdain to communicate even with Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had a portrait of Hitler in his office, and with the cannibal Jean Bokassa.
But the position of the USSR on Algeria was clear not only for this reason. Even during the war for independence, the USSR actively supported the Algerian rebels at the level of rhetoric, it is possible that weapon also supplied them. Upon achieving independence, the USSR sent its specialists to Algeria to clear mine territories, mainly bordering with Tunisia.
The French military on this occasion publicly expressed that they consider this a deadly recklessness. But the Soviet sappers escaped with only one dead directly during mine clearance, the rest died from diseases and wounds received in skirmishes with the radicals who were already gaining strength at that time. Even then, for demining, the USSR supplied Algeria with a large amount of sapper equipment and military equipment.
Under Khrushchev, as well as later under Brezhnev, the financing of the military power and infrastructure of the “fraternal countries” was carried out mainly for geopolitical purposes. The exceptions were Cuba and Algeria. The first supplied the USSR with cane sugar, rum, Havana cigars, etc. A special situation developed with Algeria, especially since they started talking about “socialism without communists”.
Not the raw material
During the years of French rule, the colony was used as a source of raw materials. Including as a source of agricultural products. The French quickly realized that the lands adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea could be used to grow Merlot and Cabernet grapes.
Due to cheap labor and the fertility of the territory, it turned out to be more profitable to supply budget wine material from Algeria than from French vineyards. After Algeria achieved independence, French purchases ceased.
Algeria found itself in a difficult situation. The internal demand for alcohol, due to the repatriation of Christians to France, turned out to be small: at that time, if local Muslims drank alcohol, then secretly, so that no one would see.
And then the USSR came to the rescue. Upon learning that during mine clearance a huge amount of fabulously cheap wine material had accumulated in the warehouses, Nikita Sergeevich agreed that Algeria would pay for military assistance, equipment and labor of Soviet specialists with this raw material.
At first, cheap dry wine called "Algerian" was supplied from Algeria. The look of the bottles was very attractive: a label with an oriental beauty, a lead cork, inscriptions in Arabic and French.
But the quality did not suit the Soviet consumer: the part of the population that did not suffer from alcoholism, brought up on Crimean and Kuban wines, after tasting it a couple of times, did not buy it again. Well, the marginal strata of society were focused on the fact that the wine quickly “inserted”, because “sourness” was not to their taste.
Thank you, Comrade Shmurdyak
Then the Soviet wine industry decided to stop buying ready-made wines, and create a product from Algerian wine material that is focused specifically on the “target audience”. Rumor has it that the word “shmurdyak”, which is still common among the people, denoting cheap wine, comes from the name of the Kabardino-Balkarian technologist Dmitry Shmurdyak.
It is believed that it was he who allegedly stood at the origins of the creation of a new product. But there is no documentary evidence of this. As a result, fortified wine Solntsedar soon appeared on the shelves of wine stores.
It was made, sorry for the repetition, from the wine material supplied from Algeria to Novorossiysk by tankers. Further, the wine was fortified with sugar and inexpensive rectified alcohol to the condition desired by the people.
In order to reduce the cost of the process and not waste gasoline on transportation, since, as you know, there is no railway line to Gelendzhik, a wine pipeline was even built. From Novorossiysk port directly to Solntsedar. Cheap twenty-degree poison was produced until the anti-alcohol campaign.
The initiative to stop the supply of wine material from Algeria did not come from the latter, but from the USSR: the Kremlin realized that this “drink” was the cause of numerous poisonings. However, military-technical cooperation between the USSR (and then Russia) and Algeria did not stop.
Now Russia is still the largest supplier of weapons to Algeria. But after the cessation of production of Solntsedar, although some goods from this country are still delivered to Russia, the authorities of modern Russia are forced only to write off her debts.
Nuclear strike called "Solntsedar"
And all this is solely for geopolitical purposes: if only there were no color revolutions, if only NATO did not come there. It should be noted that already in the eighties, just when the question of removing the Solntsedar from production was raised, the work of Soviet specialists in Algeria became extremely unsafe.
This happened because of the galloping spread of Islamic fundamentalism. On the part of the Algerian regular army, the security of those sent from the USSR was extremely poor, the soldiers fell asleep at the post, etc. Therefore, it is possible that the purchase of wine materials stopped precisely because of discussions about the advisability of such cooperation.
Indeed, military cooperation was interrupted in fact until 2006, and not at all for reasons of preserving the health of the Soviet people. At the moment, despite a certain tendency towards nostalgia for everything Soviet, the official regulators of the alcohol market consider Solntsedar to be a surrogate.
In 2011, Rospatent refused to re-register this trademark for this very reason. In this connection, the resumption of supplies of Algerian wine material to Russia, even against the backdrop of European sanctions, is not to be expected.
Today, among serious winemakers, it has an extremely low reputation, caused precisely by its use for the production of Soviet "mumble". There are no Algerian wines on the Russian market, respectively. And now the country buys weapons from Russia for money, although Russia had to write off the old debt, and quite profitably.
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