The photographer roused himself as we were leaving the bus. Laboriously gathering his camera bag and supplies, he tripped and fell down the bus steps, flinging his gear everywhere. His stumble had a welcome effect: embarrassed for the first time by everyone’s laughter, he ended his bullying. Somehow he managed to pick up his camera and bags and take the photos he needed.
The rest of the trip continued in the same fashion, the toleration of his behavior being even more significant than his prodigious drinking in a place where alcohol abuse is the norm for many.
Countless cultures revel in drinking and many countries, especially northern ones such as Finland, face serious alcoholism problems. Britain’s per capita alcohol consumption, especially in Northern Ireland, isn’t far behind Russia’s and neither is Portugal’s. Is drinking in Russia really any different? If so, does it say anything about its society?
According to official statistics, Russians drink eighteen liters, or almost five gallons, of pure alcohol a year per person. Although the World Health Organization, which tends to adopt conservative estimates, puts the number slightly lower, at around sixteen liters, that’s twice the internationally recommended limit. The WHO places three other countries higher in per capita consumption: Moldova, the Czech Republic and Hungary. In Russia, however, adult males are responsible for around 90 percent of it, meaning they drink a staggering thirty-five-plus liters, according to a 2011 WHO report that estimated every fifth male death is attributable to the effects of alcohol.1
The Primary Chronicle, a history of Kievan Rus’—the state that preceded Moscow and other northern principalities and that formed the foundation of modern Russia—explained the Kievan princes’ rejection of Islam by citing the religion’s prohibition of alcohol.2 “Rusi est vesele piti, ne mozhet bez nego byti,” Prince Vladimir supposedly told the Muslim delegates who had come to convert him: “People of Rus’ are merrier when they drink, living without it, they can’t think.” While the account is almost certainly untrue, it illustrates popular conceptions about the importance of drink in Russian life and thought.
If language is among the main determinants of culture, Russia’s drinking has made a rich contribution. The words and phrases Russians use for their participation in the essential activity include screw, pour, warm up, lick, hit the liver, rub in, fill up, pour in the eyes, suck, look through a prism, go deaf, enter nirvana, splash, get younger, read a label, organize a festival, grab a bear and many, many more—up to 350 such euphemisms, one expert has counted. There are almost as many rules and superstitions. Here are a few:
Vodka must be poured into glasses standing on a table, not raised in one’s hand.
When pouring, one arm should not cross another.
Toasting the memory of the dead should be done only with vodka, and with no clinking of glasses.
Drinking from someone else’s glass will make you a drunkard.
Once opened, bottles should always be emptied. (I saw not a single violation of that rule during all my years in Russia.)
Empty bottles should not be left on a table; at best, they should be placed on the floor.
Violating any of these rules will bring certain bad luck.
Middle-class dinner parties typically involve long hours around tables where many consider eating something to pass the time between countless toasts. During the communist era, when going to a restaurant was a rare treat and “going out” usually meant dinner at someone else’s home, most Soviets laid on their feasts in living rooms, cramming together tables in front of the couch and pulling up all available chairs. Family snapshots of birthday, anniversary and most other celebrations from the late Soviet period invariably depict relatives and friends squashed together around tables laden with caviar, pickled vegetables, cold cuts of meat and a multitude of bottles. Even today, tables are usually set with zakuski when guests arrive—main dishes come out hours later. Once seated, guests are expected to remain there for the foreseeable future, imbibing shot after shot, with breaks only for the bathroom and to smoke, often outside or in stairwells. Toasts invariably include “To women!” Females are allowed to sip from their shot glasses, reinforcing the common perception of them as members of the weaker sex. When the time comes for guests to leave, there are special toasts for that, too. Among the variations, “Na pososhok”—“A glass for the journey home”—is the most common.
That’s when people leave on good terms. My mother described many parties in Soviet days that began in celebratory moods around the table with the usual toasts and speeches, laughter and jokes, but ended with guests, mostly men, lying drunk on the floor. Some would have to be carried out. Others would begin arguments that would sometimes spill out onto the streets. “It was a disgusting spectacle,” she said, “but considered very normal.” That’s because vodka was regarded as a panacea for everything—“woe, bad fortune, sickness, all life’s evils,” my mother added. “True happiness could only be perceived under the influence of vodka. Vodka was God.”
What I find most difficult about drinking in Russia today is the offense refusal causes. A very close friend who sometimes drinks heavily has rebuked me angrily for declining to quaff more than the too many we’d already had. According to him, I’m committing the unpardonable offense of forcing him to drink alone. That attitude can be a serious problem when I’m working. On the one hand, even a sip of liquor can affect my thinking. On the other, waving off a proffered drink in someone’s office can set a bad tone, especially for an interview. So in the interest of getting decent answers and weaving them into a story in time for a deadline, I have, like so many other foreigners in Russia, often tried to limit my intake while concentrating on maintaining a level head.
Visitors to Moscow and St. Petersburg tend to take more notice of the effects of drinking than the residents, who are inured to its consequences. As in most other countries, parks and other public spaces invariably contain homeless drunks. Their numbers are often joined by groups of beer-drinking young people, no matter what the time of day. Unlike the United States, Russia has no laws against carrying open bottles of beer or liquor outdoors, and you see a lot of it, but even that’s common elsewhere. What most distinguishes Russian drinking and makes it far more dangerous is a form of bingeing called zapoi—drinking sprees that can last from a day or two to a couple of weeks, during which Russians essentially shut themselves off to drink themselves into repeated stupors. “A real Russian man can find his way out of any zapoi,” goes an old saying. But those benders—indulged in by rich and poor alike—seriously increase the incidence of sudden heart failure. They are further evidence of the country’s deep passion for drinking with abandon, as opposed to just having one or two with dinner. Contrast France, for example, which takes wine seriously, but where many limit their intake to one or two glasses.
I believe Russia’s attitudes to drinking reflect something deeper in the country’s culture: a sense of pessimism about the ability to better oneself. Russian fatalism helps explain why there are nearly two million officially recognized alcoholics in the country—surely a serious understatement—and more than ten million alkashy, people who drink at the first opportunity.
Beyond a justification for drinking to the point of stupefaction, vodka’s allure is enhanced by the widespread belief that it was first conceived in Russia. Although a number of non-Russian scholars contend it probably arrived from Poland, Moscow’s traditional bitter rival, Russians tend to defend the claim jealously. In support or not, they often say that the word vodka is derived from voda, Russian for water. Is it? Historian Edward Keenan questions the common belief, saying the real Russian diminutives for water, voditsa and vodichka, bear stresses on the second syllable (“vod-EE-tsa” and “vod-EE-chka”),3 whereas vodka retains what he believes is the original Polish stress on the first syllable (“VOD-ka”). The Russian diminutive for vodka, vodochka (pronounced “VOD-ochka”), also stresses the first syllable, which may indicate that it derived from the Polish wódka.
Keenan thinks vodka dates to the sixteenth century, when distillation was first developed in Eastern Europe. Other Western scholars claim that knowledge about distilling spirits from wine—the key development for making vodka—spread across Europe from France earlier, reaching Poland between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.4 Still others believe the Slavs learned to distill from the Tatars.
Whatever the truth, Russia’s national drink is little more than pure alcoholic spirits diluted with water. For centuries, vodka distilled from rye was considered the best, and many Russians still hold to that conviction.5 Other varieties are produced chiefly from wheat or potatoes, although today’s Russians dismiss Polish potato vodka as a bastardization. Since early distillation techniques resulted in many poisonous impurities, flavorings such as honey were often added to improve taste. Techniques improved significantly in the eighteenth century, when it was discovered that filtering vodka through charcoal removed many of the impurities, and it became an integral part of the process.6
But the liquor now known as vodka wasn’t called that until relatively recently. Before the mid-1700s, it was known as vino, wine, because it was considered essentially to be “grain wine.”7 Vodka initially developed as an unofficial term. High-quality aromatic vodkas—as opposed to the poorer stuff drunk mostly by peasants—were called nastoiki (infusions). The range of flavors expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, when distillers began adding fruit essences—including anise, cherry and black currant—for their taste instead of to mask impurities.
The very best vodkas were produced by landowning gentry, who were granted distilling rights by the tsar and could afford to produce the purest spirits—sometimes making just two liters of vodka for every hundred liters of raw materials—because they received grain free from their serfs and logged wood for charcoal from their own forests. Distillation was usually a pastime, but fierce competition to produce the best was partly responsible for the international acclaim that Russian vodka first won in the eighteenth century.8 However, the explosion of factory production for profit in the 1800s resulted in a serious decline in quality.
Many of the top private distilleries, including two of the biggest, Smirnov and Shustov, were founded around midcentury. In the 1860s, an average distillery produced six thousand vedr, or buckets—an old Russian measurement of liquid volume equal to 12.3 liters—annually. By 1900, 2,200 distilleries were producing seventy-eight million vedr, making Russia the main European producer and distributor of spirits, surpassing runners-up Germany and Austria-Hungary.9
The generally low quality of privately distilled vodkas in the nineteenth century prompted the development of new standards by the renowned chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who is much better known for having conceived the periodic table of the elements. Mendeleev helped define what’s perceived to be the ideal for Russian vodka today: spirits distilled from grain and diluted with water to a concentration of 40 percent.10 The tsarist government later adopted his formulation as the standard for state-produced vodka, and well-known current brands such as Stolichnaya and Russkii Standart still claim to use his method.
For the poorest Russians, even the cheapest varieties of vodka are a luxury. Instead, many drink the Russian version of moonshine: samogon, literally “self-distilled.” The tradition of producing and drinking samogon is only slightly less storied than that of vodka as a whole, but its effects have proved far deadlier.
Although Moldova, the Czech Republic and Hungary have higher per-capita alcohol consumption than Russia, as noted, their territories are tiny in comparison. The Russian damage from drinking is staggering. Alcohol poisoning kills some forty thousand people a year—compared to about three hundred in the United States—and plays a role in more than half of all premature deaths. According to the government, 38 percent of Russians between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine suffer from alcoholism. The number jumps to 55 percent for those between the ages of forty and fifty-nine. Prime Minister Medvedev has called those numbers a “natural disaster.”
What took place in Pskov in 2006 was shocking even by those standards. About 370 miles northwest of Moscow and a stone’s throw from the Estonian border, Pskov is the site of a crucial eleventh-century victory by a Russian prince against an order of Teutonic knights, dramatized by the legendary Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in his film Alexander Nevsky. The city later became the seat of a thriving principality that was a member of a powerful Baltic trading alliance called the Hanseatic League, but its celebrated past has been eclipsed by economic depression, despite the construction of food-processing plants and machine-building factories that provide locals with mostly humble manufacturing jobs. Like their counterparts throughout the country, doctors, teachers and other professionals left the rural region en masse after the Soviet collapse, leaving behind mainly low-paid blue-collar workers together with the elderly and unemployed.11
So when local hospitals began filling up with people whose skin and eyes had turned a ghastly shade of yellow in the summer of 2006, the news initially attracted little attention beyond the region. The patients were suffering from the unmistakable signs of poisoning: toxic hepatitis had destroyed their livers, causing poisons to build up in their bodies. With the early onset of an unusually harsh winter, many more showed up at the hospitals during the following months. Up to a thousand people were hospitalized and when more than a hundred died painfully slow deaths, alarms finally sounded in Moscow.
Despite the severity of its epidemic, Pskov was but one of several regions distressed by poisonings that year. The spike turned out to have been indirectly caused by a government campaign against the illegal production of alcohol. Driving prices higher, the crackdown prompted more people to buy booze on the black market, where it’s often laced with cheap industrial solvents that contain twice the concentration of alcohol as regular spirits. Even tiny amounts can be deadly.
Pskov’s profusion of manufacturing plants includes factories producing cleaning solutions, antifreeze and many other solvents. No doubt workers or bosses sold industrial alcohol to middlemen who supplied it to individuals and gangs that mixed moonshine from the cheapest possible ingredients, often masking the flavor with additives before pouring it into used bottles of legitimate liquor that were sold in local grocery shops and kiosks.12 Most of the victims were homeless. Some were poisoned by a medical disinfectant that was especially cheap because it was exempt from taxes.13
Pskov’s high rate of poisonings could have happened anywhere in Russia, where roughly half of alcohol sales are illegal. Thus many people die not just because they drink but because they do it dangerously, consuming not only moonshine but also anything containing alcohol, including cologne, cleaning fluid and even jet fuel. Hundreds more pass out and freeze to death overnight every winter, boosting alcoholism’s contribution to Russia’s looming demographic crisis and helping drive men’s life expectancy down to sixty-four years, as I’ve mentioned, compared to seventy-four for women. That has helped skew the sex ratio to its most imbalanced point since 1979, with women now outnumbering men by more than ten million as the population continues to shrink.14
Massive drinking continues despite ever-present reminders of the risks—along with smoking, which is heavier, per capita, than anywhere else in the world—partly because Russians tend to overestimate how healthy they are. According to a recent study, 95 percent think they’re in good or fair health, despite their poor diets and infrequent exercise.15 The same study found that although most Russians understand the links between activities such as drinking and smoking and chronic disease, they tend to accept the risks as inevitable consequences of their lifestyles.
That attitude says something about a national character formed and sustained under difficult living conditions, and it’s getting worse. Although vodka drinking has remained relatively stable since the Soviet collapse, heavy marketing of drinks lower in alcohol, such as beer—which many Russians don’t consider a “real” alcoholic drink—have contributed to skyrocke
ting sales, especially among the young. Hard as it may be to believe, Russia’s already legendary alcohol consumption has tripled since the collapse of communism, when drinking was among the few means of escaping the bleak realities of Soviet life.
In 1961, my father, George, spent an academic year as a graduate exchange student at Moscow State University. Founded in the late eighteenth century by the renowned physicist Mikhail Lomonosov—a legendary polymath who discovered an atmosphere on Venus and helped shape the modern Russian language—MGU, as it was known, had recently moved to the largest of Stalin’s seven iconic neo-Gothic skyscrapers that loomed over the city from Sparrow Hills, then called Lenin Hills.
Much had changed since Stalin’s death eight years earlier. Nikita Khrushchev’s thaw had loosened restrictions on life and work, although it would be only three years until a group of old-guard conspirators would remove him from power. Their coup d’état would end his campaign of de-Stalinization and replace him with Leonid Brezhnev, who was backed by countless cadres of Soviet officials who’d been threatened by Khrushchev’s boat-rocking reforms. Meanwhile, the year 1961, when the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit around the earth to make him the first man in space, was still deep in the Cold War era.
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