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The Perils of Vodka in Post-Soviet Russia
 Six hundred tons of hazardous liquid, intended to be sold as ‘vodka’ to the members of Russia’s lower class, were recently seized in the southern city of Voronezh. This particular batch of solvent contained cleaners, car window fluid and dust-removal chemicals, yet this is not the worst of what Russian home-brewed alcohol, usually referred to as samogon, has to offer. Other ingredients commonly found in these poisonous concoctions are de-icers, perfumes, aftershave products and anti-rust treatments.
The seizure is part of the government’s effort to combat the outbreak of alcohol poisoning that has swept the country in the past few weeks. While the manufacture of this cheap and often lethal samogon is one of Russia’s oldest traditions, recent government legislation intended to curb the sale of untaxed alcohol has led to a dramatic rise in the price of legally manufactured wine, beer and—most importantly—vodka. On July 1, the government imposed new alcohol labeling regulations and introduced a new automated alcohol tracking system with the intention of combating illegal alcohol sales.
However, bureaucratic bungling, chaos and confusion over the new regulations led to a temporary halt on the movement of alcohol throughout the country. As liquor began to disappear from the shelves, unscrupulous entrepreneurs filled the void, supplying eager drinkers with a fast, easy and inexpensive alternative. As this rise in the price of vodka has increased demand for such illegal substitutes, self-manufactured alcohol has flooded the market and the ingredients used in these mixtures have become increasingly toxic.
The situation has grown worse in the months since the new regulation was implemented, and a government historically averse to acknowledging crises has finally recognized the severity of the problem. Last Monday, 14 districts of Russia’s Irkutsk region in Siberia declared an emergency situation after an outbreak of poisoning from bootleg vodka swept the region, as 879 people fell ill and 33 died as a result of drinking poisonous samogon concoctions. The region of Pvskov, near the Baltic Sea, declared a state of emergency earlier this month in response to the spike in alcohol-related deaths, and even President Vladmir Putin himself has publicly acknowledged that the government erred in its handling of the alcohol situation. “Officials and the government—top level officials—appeared unprepared,” Putin declared in his annual question-and-answer broadcast. “[The government] failed to take into account all of the problems and the scale of the work that was to be done, and did not take prompt measures to bring order to the market.”
A HISTORY OF VICE
This is not the first time the Russian government’s efforts to curb the people’s voracious appetite for vodka (translated literally as “little water”) has ended in disaster. In 1917, three years before the start of America’s own ill-fated Prohibition effort, the Bolsheviks closed all domestic wineries and criminalized the production and sale of alcohol. Trotsky, historian Steven White reports in Russia Goes Dry, argued that the landed elite were responsible for a culture that could “not exist without the constant lubricant of alcohol,” and upon the Bolshevik leaders’ orders, the Red Guard used fire hoses to pump wine and spirits into the gutters of St. Petersburg.
Despite such noble intentions to rid Russians of their vice, peasants began to convert their grain into alcohol and sell it on the black market, and as alcohol-related deaths spiked and economic difficulties for the government became more acute, the Soviet government began to reconsider its policy. By 1927, efforts were being made to reestablish the state monopoly on vodka production.
Seventy years later, party leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided to tackle the thorny issue of Russian alcoholism once again. He was so devoted to this particular cause that soon after his designation as General Secretary he became known as the “Mineral Water Secretary.” Gorbachev introduced legislation that increased the price of alcohol and placed restrictions on when and where alcohol could be sold. Once again, however, these efforts produced the opposite effect than was intended; alcohol production went underground and helped finance organized crime circles, and Gorbachev began to lose political ground. By 1988, most of the alcohol reform measures had been reversed.
A BIPOLAR STATE
Thus, the negative corollaries of the most recent government initiatives to combat alcohol consumption in Russia follow in a chain of similarly failed efforts at reform. Like previous attempts, Putin’s efforts to restrict and monitor access to alcohol have served only to drive the industry underground, demonstrating that the recent outbreak of samodot alcohol poisoning is not the nation’s primary ailment, but rather the symptom of a much more serious and entrenched disease.
The life expectancy for a Russian male is 57 years—15 years shorter than the average life of a Russian woman. This discrepancy is, in large part, due to the Russian cultural emphasis on male drinking. According to a survey conducted in 2000, the average Russian drinks 15 liters of alcohol per year. In 1999, the drowning rate in Russia was nearly 10 times that of the United States (94 percent of drowning victims were drunk when they died). By some estimates, men in Russia drink eight times as much alcohol as women. “There is no simple answer to why male life expectancy is so short in Russia,” Dr. Mikhail Uhnov, chief physician of a hospital in Pityaranta, told the New York Times. “But you could probably say drinking is in first place.”
Alcohol is slowly killing the nation’s men, and yet—as shown by the disastrous effects of recent government efforts—the extent to which alcohol is entrenched in Russian society and culture makes reform exceedingly difficult. “Russian culture is a culture of extremes,” explained Brown Professor of History Tom Gleason. “It’s like Russians to get very drunk and then feel very bad when they come to. Russian culture is bipolar the way some people are bipolar.” Gleason pointed to a number of factors that have historically contributed to the development of Russian drinking culture; he argues that the extreme climate, peasant culture, poverty and religion have all played a role in the present alcohol crisis in the country.
Thus, in response to the immediate outbreak of alcohol poisonings, a variety of solutions have been proposed, including reintroducing a state monopoly on alcohol manufacturing, or as reported by the BBC, even providing a cheap yet safe “people’s vodka” that would help to avoid mass poisonings. Such solutions, however, do not address the underlying social, cultural, and economic conditions that cause Russians to resort to such desperate measures in their quest for alcohol. In post-Soviet Russia, especially, drinking offers an escape; “there are a tremendous number of poor people who can do nothing more than get a hold of a bottle of alcohol and drink into oblivion,” explained Gleason. “And it’s so traditional.”
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