Sour Side Effect to Anti-Vodka Campaign

Grumbling among ordinary Soviet citizens over the Soviet government’s tough anti-alcohol campaign has apparently grown to the point where it now endangers public support for the broader political, economic and social reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.

The government daily Izvestia, calling for a reassessment of the campaign, said Friday that people are blaming the reform effort for severe shortages of sugar and other commodities used in the home brewing of alcohol and have begun longing for the old days of relative comfort even though it came at the price of limited progress.

“This is not less dangerous than drunkenness,” Izvestia said in a front-page article, its second critical report in two days. “We cannot allow that in the third year of perestroika (Gorbachev’s program of economic restructuring) that people longingly remember the candy counters of the era of stagnation.”

Izvestia did not indicate whether Gorbachev, who for three years has made the campaign against alcohol abuse virtually a personal crusade, was planning to back down. To do so would be embarrassing for him. But it left little doubt about the high political cost if he does not.

It said that decisions to reduce alcohol consumption by cutting back production, limiting sales, raising prices and then punishing drunkenness more harshly were “not supported by the public.”

Izvestia added another element to the mounting debate here over perestroika and other changes advocated by Gorbachev. The political atmosphere is such now that those who support Gorbachev’s reforms believe that bureaucrats, who oppose plans for economic reorganization and the shifts in power that this would bring, are trying to sabotage perestroika by cutting back on supplies of sugar and other consumer products, hoping that Gorbachev will be blamed.

The main complaint, Izvestia said in its reports Thursday and Friday, deals with the countrywide shortage of sugar, which is used extensively in home brewing. Sugar has been “in deficit,” as Soviets put it, for more than a year in most provincial cities, and the shortage has now hit Moscow, Leningrad and other major centers.

“Tea in school cafeterias is going unsweetened,” a woman reader wrote to the newspaper Soviet Culture earlier this week. “Cakes, pastries and cookies begin to remind one more of flour mixed with margarine . . . while in any respectable supermarket you can buy sugar without ration slips--but only at twice the cost.”

Sugar “must come back,” the paper declared. It dismissed as inadequate plans to ration sugar or to import more, and implied that the only solution lies in ending the anti-alcohol drive and increasing the production and sale of vodka.