It was ILLEGAL to have a BEARD where??

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Did you know that it was once illegal to have a beard and if you tried to grow one it was forcibly shaved off? This was actually a real thing. It all started because a guy went backpacking across Europe except the guy was Peter the Great and he wasn't so much backpacking through Europe as being carried through it by a bunch of guards. And by the time he got back to Russia, he decided that he wanted to make the country more like the West and it all started with hair and makeup, aka no beards allowed. And if you have ever been told not to do something and then all of a sudden that is the only thing you want to do, then you will know just how fiercely people tried to resist this, especially after the church declared clean-shaven faces as blasphemous. It got to the point where Peter would invite guests to his palace only to hold them down and forcibly shave their beards himself.

[00:00:43]Eventually, probably after realizing that the country was way too big for him to shave every single beard, he implemented a beard tax where people had to pay to keep their beards. Hi, I'm a writer who likes food and these are Russian blinis which are like crepes except they have yeast in them and are served with condensed milk. This was a win.