Alcoholism Top Soviet Problem : Romanovs to Gorbachev, Vodka Remains the Czar

Russians, a dismayed German envoy observed long ago, “are more addicted to drunkenness than any nation in the world.”

“They drink mainly vodka,” the envoy, Adam Olearius, observed in his memoirs, which he published in 1647. “They pour it out like water, until they begin to behave like people robbed of reason, and finally must be picked up as though they were dead. To see them lying here and there in the streets, wallowing in filth, is so common that no notice is taken of it.”

More than 350 years have passed since Olearius served the court of Holstein in Moscow during the reign of Czar Mikhail Fyodorovich, the first of the Romanovs, but his observations are sadly fresh and relevant today.

Abuse of alcohol is a global affliction, but nowhere, except possibly in neighboring Poland, does it seem so widespread and so extravagantly self-destructive as in the Soviet Union, particularly in the vast Russian heartland. Drinking with total abandon, not only at home but on the farm and in the factory, is an ingrained cultural habit that takes a huge and growing toll of the nation’s economy and health.

In every Soviet city--even in Moscow, for all its order and regimentation--the pathetic young men and a growing number of women who reel down the sidewalks, straining to appear sober, are an everyday sight. They stagger through multiple lanes of onrushing traffic, cluster outside liquor stores “three to a bottle,” as a popular saying has it, and doze in the weed-filled wastelands that surround the city’s sprawling jumbles of public housing.

Alcoholism is the Soviet Union’s most severe social problem, one that has steadily worsened over the past half-century. In 1980, the Soviet youth newspaper Molodoi Kommunist (Young Communist) disclosed that fully 37% of Soviet workers drink to excess, compared with only 11% in 1925. In recent years, state alcohol production has increased more than twice as fast as the population.

Drinking is now the Soviet Union’s leading cause of premature death. Over the past several years, Soviet officials have disclosed that alcohol also plays a major role in 40% of the country’s 860,000 divorces each year, 80% of violent crimes, 30% of traffic accidents and 25% of industrial deaths and injuries, the total number of which is a state secret.

Problem drinking, an Interior Ministry official reported last year, is “70% more common among employees with hazardous and difficult working conditions” than among factory workers as a whole.

Western studies point to rising alcoholism as part of the explanation for a 50% increase in infant mortality and a decline of four years in male life expectancy since the late 1960s, a disintegration of public health unique in the industrialized world.

Soviet press reports indicate an equally alarming rise in the incidence of birth defects and retardation in infants born to women alcoholics, whose number is growing faster than that of male problem drinkers.

According to an American authority on Soviet alcoholism, Vladimir G. Treml, nearly 40,000 Soviet men and women--15 per 100,000 people--die each year from acute alcohol poisoning, a toll much higher than in Western countries.

Still another discouraging trend is the growing youthfulness of Soviet alcoholics. In the past decade, their average age has dropped by five to seven years, and one-third of the registered alcoholics have told researchers that they were introduced to drinking before the age of 10. Soviet sociologists have found that the majority of habitual drinkers were encouraged by alcoholic parents, some of whom, with no thought of the damage they were doing, thought it amusing to watch the antics of a tipsy child.

Fittingly, after years of inconclusive debate in the press over what to do about alcoholism, the first major domestic policy initiative of the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has been to launch an anti-alcohol campaign. On May 16, the government announced a package of measures that include raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21 and allowing stores and restaurants to sell alcoholic beverages only five, rather than nine, hours a day--from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Drinking is to be banned at official functions, apparently to set an example, and production of the fortified wines known as bormotukha , or “mumbler,” for their effect on the drinker’s speech, is to be phased out by 1988; overall production of alcohol will be gradually cut back. Penalties for moonshining--a large and integral part of the rural economy--and for public drunkenness have been significantly toughened.

The impact of the new regulations is already being felt, though not in a way that is likely to leave much of an imprint on Soviet drinking habits.

At lunchtime the other day in Moscow’s prestigious Prague Restaurant, a waiter glanced at his watch and shrugged an apology to a foreigner: “Sorry, I can’t bring you the wine for another half hour.”

In Moscow’s Yasnevo district, one of the public housing projects that ring the city, a crowd of would-be Sunday drinkers was reportedly broken up by police on May 26 after a noisy confrontation that began with the discovery of a padlock on the neighborhood liquor store and a sign saying it was closed till 2 o’clock.

“A whole platoon of militia surrounded them, and there were fights,” a man who watched from his balcony said later. “It was just like what we see on television when police arrest American demonstrators and throw them into special wagons.”

In keeping with a traditional approach to social problems, the new anti-alcohol campaign calls for preventive education and more treatment facilities, but the official press is stressing punitive measures and a moralizing tone. A few articles by medical experts have called for greater emphasis on alcoholism as a disease, but the official accent, at least for now, is on discipline for drunkards.

Opinion polls show wide public support for strict curbs on drinking, with many in favor of far more Draconian steps such as rationing of hard liquor or outright prohibition--a step the last Romanov czar, Nicholas II, tried in 1914 without success.

The new Bolshevik regime gave up prohibition in 1925 as a failure, the chief effect of which was to make moonshine--known in Russian as samogon --a universal and enduring part of rural life.

Popular as it is, many believe the new attack on the “green serpent,” as Russians call alcoholism, shows no great promise of success.

“It is disappointing,” a middle-age Moscow woman said. “It will make life harder for alcoholics, but they can still drink all they want. They’ll just have to buy it between 2 and 7.”

On the average, Soviet adults now consume the equivalent of 15 liters (4 gallons) of pure alcohol a year, including an estimated 7 liters (1.8 gallons) of illegal home-brew. This is twice the American average and double the Soviet figure of 30 years ago.

These figures, moreover, mask wide ethnic variations: Largely Muslim populations in the southern tier of Soviet republics drink considerably less, while Russians and other Slavic groups--in addition to Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians along the Baltic coast--drink a good deal more.

The Russian style of drinking also magnifies its destructiveness. Soviets take 60% of their alcohol in concentrated form, as vodka and cheap, potent brandy rather than in the more dilute beer and wine that predominate in the West. Unlike Westerners, Russians do not sip their liquor as a lubricant for social conversation or a supplement to eating, but guzzle it with the sole purpose of producing an anesthetic stupor.

Three young workers in the buffet of a hotel outside Moscow illustrate the style. It is 7 a.m., and their breakfast consists of a bottle of cheap, 80-proof Armenian brandy. They pour it into three tall tumblers. Each gulps his down, without a breath, in one long, searing swallow. Elapsed time from purchase to departure: 45 seconds.

Russians sometimes call this practice “drawing a veil,” a bit of alcoholic gauze to mask the tedium and hardships of the day ahead. Indeed, the most common motivation Russians cite for heavy drinking is simply boredom, an escape from the spiritual emptiness that pervades Soviet society.

“Compared to most cities, Moscow is a lively place,” said an intellectual who has traveled widely in the Soviet Union. “But out in the countryside, in the regular cities, on the collective farms, there is really nothing else to do, nothing else to spend your money on. So you drink.”

Drinking with abandon is one of the oldest of Russian traits. Legend holds that Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who accepted Orthodox Christianity for Russia in the year 988, spurned Islam and its proscription of alcohol because “drinking is the joy of Russians. . . . They cannot live without it.”

What they drank then was mostly wine and mead, a liquor made of fermented honey. The art of distilling liquor was acquired only in the 16th Century, from the settled remnants of the Mongol hordes. Alcohol became, in a sense, a lasting legacy of the Tatar yoke.

A century later, when Olearius arrived on the scene in 1634, drinking to stupefaction was already epidemic, not only among the peasantry but also among the nobility and Orthodox Russian clergy. Historian Richard Pipes notes that the government, which soon acquired a monopoly on vodka production, has forever after been at cross-purposes with itself in trying to curb a major source of its own revenue.

According to Soviet figures, the average family now spends about 15% of its income on drink, while the state gets 10% to 12% of its revenue from sales of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol is one of the few consumer items never in short supply.

In a country where most people have never seen frozen foods, and the lists of officially designated “deficit” or scarce consumer goods run into the hundreds of items, vodka, brandy and bormotukha are universally and reliably available, even in the most remote villages, sometimes in astonishing abundance.

In the countryside, mass drunkenness still occurs, with whole villages of several hundred people going on two- or three-day binges to celebrate weddings and holidays. Newspapers occasionally carry reports of milk cows perishing from lack of attention while an entire village or collective farm sleeps off its collective hangover.

Samogon, not state-produced vodka, is king in the countryside, where it often takes the place of rubles as a medium of exchange. One rural district in Byelorussia, the newspaper Selskaya Zhizn (Rural Life) reported last summer, has 80 known moonshiners whose stills consume annually 1.3 tons of rye grain, five tons of potatoes and 1,300 pounds of sugar.

Drinking in industrial plants is no less rampant than on the farm. Soviet journalists have discovered whole factories standing idle while the workers were off drinking or locked in police “sobering-up stations.”

At the Usolye mining equipment plant near the Siberian city of Irkutsk, “everyone knows that a lot of drinking goes on,” the newspaper Socialist Industry reported. It continued:

“It is 10:50 a.m. A crowd of workers gathers in front of a liquor store. The Azerbaijani port is selling like hot cakes. No one stands on ceremony. If you want, you can drink right out of the bottle at a streetcar stop, then throw the empty bottle in the snow, hop on the streetcar and go to the plant. You can enter the factory premises through a hole in the fence. Although lunch break is still half an hour away, about 15 people have gone out and come back through this hole--and they’ve come back with two or three bottles.”

A shop foreman was quoted as saying that the nationwide labor shortage makes it hard to fire drunk workers. “The labor problem is very serious,” he said. “Therefore, no one gets fired, and we do the best we can to re-educate the workers we have.”

The Soviet leadership seems to recognize the country’s colossal alcohol problem, but each time it has taken tentative measures to control it in recent years, the result has been still more problems.

In the 1960s, the government tried to wean drinkers from vodka by expanding production of less potent fortified wines. But people simply drank these as well, and they had the additional effect of helping to break down barriers to heavy drinking among women.

In 1979 and again in 1981, vodka prices were raised in the hope of discouraging drinking, but the result was public discontent and an explosion of samogon production, evidenced by a nationwide surge in the sale of sugar. To curb the attractions of moonshining, a cheaper vodka was introduced in 1983, after Yuri V. Andropov became Soviet leader, and grateful drinkers promptly dubbed it “Andropovka.”