Russians: The People behind the Power

4 Drinking

The passion for drinking is innate in Russia.

—Nikolai Leskov (1831–95)

I don’t like drunkards, but I don’t trust those who don’t drink.

—Maxim Gorky (1868–1936)

However much vodka you buy, you’ll still have to run back for more.

—Russian saying

As if the beleaguered residents of Novoi Urengoi needed another reminder of the elements’ crushing domination even at the height of summer, endless dark clouds hung over the concrete-slab apartment blocks that stand amid the town’s gritty industrial sprawl on my second visit there. I’d returned to the Arctic Yamal Nenets region of western Siberia to observe the alarming effects of climate change on the surrounding landscape and had spent the day driving through a vast expanse of sandy tundra that stretches beyond the town limits, where scrubby brush and stunted trees growing above the permafrost struggle to complete their foliation cycles during the three months when the winter relaxes its choke hold there.

The tundra eventually gives way to the world’s biggest frozen peat bog, an area larger than Texas, much of it dotted with puddles and ponds, some as big as lakes. Most are expanding because Siberia is melting. Enormous tracts of tundra frozen for tens of thousands of years are thawing so fast you can see the water level rising from year to year. The melting is releasing carbon dioxide and methane, greenhouse gases that have been trapped in the permafrost for more than ten thousand years. Now they bubble up so violently in some of the lakes that it prevents them from freezing even in the depths of winter. Siberia is among the best places to observe such effects of climate change because no warm jet stream or other weather pattern moderates its harsh continental climate. Thus it reflects even the smallest changes in global conditions sooner than elsewhere.

My guide was a botanist from the Siberian city of Tomsk, hundreds of miles to the south, who had been sounding a lonely alarm about the transforming landscape. Fair-haired and handsome, Sergei Kirpotin, who was in his late forties, had an appropriately weathered face and the unhurried, easygoing manner of someone who spends a lot of time in the wilderness. We were accompanied by two more environmental scientists from other parts of Siberia and a couple of Kirpotin’s students who were taking advantage of the small sum I’d agreed to pay him for expenses to conduct climate-change research. After parking the rattling van we’d driven along remote, broken roads, we waded into the bogs.

The going was even tougher than expected, at least by me. With every step, our feet sank deep below the spongy lichen and moss that obscured the boundary between the semisolid ground and marsh water that stretched to the horizon. I couldn’t help thinking what a great setting it would make for a chase scene in a horror film in which the victim can move no faster than a snail. Even worse were the mosquitoes, gnats and other flying insects that mounted ferocious sorties whenever we strayed too close to their territory near elevated bumps along the flat ground that had been thrown up by the heaving permafrost. Why no one lived in that harsh and utterly barren landscape was no mystery.

But it was also stunningly beautiful. The never-ending expanse was splashed with patches of red, green, blue and other colors of the tundra’s fast-blooming flora. Fields of cranberries, blueberries and currants stretched as far as the eye could see. The berries were tiny but surprisingly sweet and delicious. Picking handfuls, I imagined I was the first human to have touched the bushes growing in this or that spot.

Kirpotin described how the expanding ponds and lakes were eating into land normally covered by acres and acres of spongy white lichen, which reflected the sun’s rays back into space. As the lichen disappeared, the earth absorbed more warmth, reinforcing a snowballing cycle of rising temperatures. As further evidence, telephone poles near the town that had been sunk deep into the permafrost thirty years ago now tilted in all directions, forcing the authorities to replace them with new ones bolted to concrete ties resting on top of the wet ground.

While Kirpotin pointed out dead brush surrounding the ponds and other evidence of the fast-rising water level, a young female student collected plant samples in plastic bags. I thought it odd that the other two scientists, men in their late middle age, weren’t collecting samples, measuring lichen coverage or, apparently, doing anything besides loafing around. Taciturn but otherwise perfectly friendly, they dismissed my attempts to interview them by issuing single-sentence generalities, as if afraid of being censured for even implying that anything, nature included, could be wrong with Mother Russia.

After several hours of sloshing around, we piled back into the van for the bumpy ride back to our hotel, another concrete-slab affair. Like all our arrangements, the reservations had been organized through the local administration and required special permission from the Federal Security Service that took weeks to obtain. It was a given that the authorities were keeping an eye on me, even though there was apparently nothing sensitive about my presence in the region.

As we separated to rest before dinner, one of the scientists, a leading environmental expert from the neighboring region of Khanty-Mansiisk, invited me to his room to taste some smoked fish. His expressions of pride in it were the first time I’d heard any enthusiasm from him about anything, and I accepted, postponing my note-jotting about the day to be friendly. Fifteen minutes later, I found the entire group inside his room huddled around an ancient coffee table laden with several filets of cured fish and cluttered with greasy glasses and plastic cups. The beer I’d brought was dismissed as superfluous. The tiny room’s straining refrigerator was crammed with the botanists’ pooled resources, mostly cheap vodka with names like Siberia and Old Omsk. Struggling to hide my apprehension at being unable to leave any time soon, I pulled up a rickety wooden chair, apologizing that I could stay only a few minutes.

The others were sitting on a brownish Soviet-era couch and easy chair, both pocked by many cigarette burns. A window was open, but not enough to cut the cigarette smoke and heavy smell of fish. Although the exceedingly polite scientists cleared a greasy plastic plate for me, my arrival had clearly put a damper on their fun. Victor, the gaunt, red-faced, balding man who had invited me, was sharing the room with Kirpotin and his other colleague, Alexander. He lost no time trying to revive the mood by pouring vodka from a half-empty bottle into the cups and glasses. Much as I’d have preferred lousy beer to lousy vodka, especially on my empty stomach, I knew better than to cause offense by protesting.

Everyone held up an overfull glass. “Za znakomstvo!” boomed Kirpotin in the obligatory first toast in honor of a stranger: “To our acquaintance!” We all clinked our glasses while looking each other in the eye, according to custom, before downing our shots. The warm, acrid liquid burned going down, but to leave anything in a glass unless the drinking is already well under way is bad form for Russian men, and I was all too practiced in suppressing grimaces. Mastering the technique for getting vodka down had been tough at first, especially the harsh, poor-quality stuff often served and swilled in the regions. I found something distasteful about the method most of my Russian friends used: a demonstrative exhale before the raising of glasses. But it often worked, so I emptied my lungs silently.

Afterward, everyone reached for a zakuska, a bite of food to chase down the alcohol, for which pickles or other marinated tidbits are considered best. Delicious dark Russian rye bread also serves the purpose very well, so well that just taking a smell—a technique said to have originated when bread was in short supply under communism—can also work. Russia’s preeminent historian of vodka, Alexander Nikishin—whose staunch defense of Russian greatness matched his expansive collection of antique bottles, posters and accoutrements that make up most of the displays at the vodka museum attached to Moscow’s Kristall factory (which produces Stolichnaya and some of Russia’s other famous brands, including Limonnaya and Moskovskaya)—rails against the proliferation of new, sweeter-tasting “ultra-premium” vodkas. “Vodka has to be like it’s always been,” Nikishin told me. “Unpleasant-tasting and smelling, but it gives a certain satisfaction when you drink it with the right zakuski.” I wasn’t really looking forward to the dry-looking white fish that had sat out for God knows how long, but it turned out to be delicious—delicate, with a slight smoky taste, not at all salty. “It’s wonderful,” I said.

I’d felt the mood in the room change even as the vodka ran down my throat. The reserved scholars suddenly perked up. Smiling, Victor named the fish, which I’d never heard of, a local species of carp. “I’m the only one who knows where to get the really good stuff here,” he boasted.

“He may be a botanist, but he’s expert in fish,” Alexander informed, his voice thick with sarcasm as he poured more vodka.

“Anekdot!” Victor announced: the Russian word for “joke,” this one for my benefit. “Putin and Bush are fishing in Siberia. Putin sits grimly while Bush, frantically slapping at mosquitoes on his arms and neck, looks over at the motionless Russian president.

“ ‘Vladeemeer, what the hey?’ he asks naively. ‘Why aren’t they biting you?’

“ ‘It’s forbidden!’ Putin answers sternly.”

Raising his glass, Victor concluded with “Well, davaite [let’s go]!” We clinked again and downed another round.

Not missing a beat, Alexander—a short man with dark hair and a mustache who specializes in photographing the tundra—added his contribution. “You know the difference between Russians and Americans?” His look at me started me mumbling something about attitudes toward the rule of law until he cut me off.

“Americans love their country and hate everyone who disagrees with them.” He paused to pour more shots. “Russians dislike their country and hate everyone who agrees with them.”

More jokes followed in quick succession, as if in a lighthearted game of one-upmanship. The Russian joke is told as much to relieve some of the pressure caused by life’s everyday absurdities as to elicit laughter. Famously developed under communism, the anekdot still thrives today, its barbed irony directed chiefly at the newest oppressor class: the corrupt bureaucrats who are edging out rich New Russians. As more shots were poured and consumed, I gave up all hope of returning to my room and, in the vodka’s warm glow, began basking in the company of my new acquaintances. We may have been sitting in a smelly Soviet-era room in the middle of barren nowhere, but now somehow that seemed cozy, even cool. Perhaps that’s because vodka seems to have an effect that’s especially suited to places like Russia. You feel soppier, more sentimental than under the influence of other forms of liquor, often until you’re jolted back to reality with an expression of the racism or sexism that are openly accepted in everyday life.

“It’s not true that Russia has the most beautiful women,” Victor said at one point, despite the presence of Kirpotin’s shy young protégée. “It’s just that we drink more vodka.”

By then it was getting late and with a full day of work ahead, starting with an early morning, I suggested dinner. There was little reaction. Fifteen minutes later, I tried again. “I suppose we do have to eat,” Victor replied reluctantly. “But really, I’d rather stay here.” I felt lucky that all the fish and bread had been consumed. “Of course we have to eat,” Kirpotin said sometime later, rousing everyone to his feet.

When we finally stepped outside, the warmth I felt toward my companions began extending toward dilapidated Novoi Urengoi itself. Whether or not feelings of brotherly or sisterly love for one’s drinking companions are universal, I found myself revising my attitude toward Russia as we plodded, heavily soused, along dirt paths through vacant lots surrounding the hotel. Where else would you have such an experience? “It’s not such a bad place,” you find yourself thinking. The cold, the crudeness and other unpleasantness, including the stares from local thugs driving battered BMWs and Mercedes toward one of the town’s few bars, make you feel even closer to your companions because everyone’s in the mess together. Emerging slowly but volubly onto a dusty main street, which was deserted except for occasional police casting suspicious glances, we were the greatest of friends. I suspect such feelings fuel the love a certain number of foreigners feel, or believe they feel, for Russia. The alcohol-fueled, come-what-may attitudes that often take hold of you provide a rush of excitement: the promise of hedonistic pleasure and abandon, heightened by a sense of real or perceived danger and great distance from more sober sensibilities back home.

The restaurant was decorated with cheesy mirrored panels and a revolving disco ball. Eyeing us as we stumbled in, a table of what appeared to be prostitutes had to shout to be heard above the synthesized drumbeat of the blaring pop music. More vodka helped wash down dinner, and the new toasts included paeans to Victor’s Khanty-Mansiisk and Kirpotin’s Tomsk, cities I solemnly vowed to visit as soon as I could. Although I was beyond recalling how much we drank, I remember Kirpotin remaining levelheaded throughout and looking out for us weaker-minded revelers. When Victor, who’d done most of the pouring in the hotel, suddenly passed out at the table in the middle of dinner, everyone else continued as if nothing had happened. Later, we carried him back to the hotel.

Imagine my surprise when I looked into his room early the next morning to find him gnawing on a cheap salami and pouring from a freshly opened bottle of vodka. “Come in, have a shot!” he offered cheerfully. Head pounding, I made my excuses with difficulty. He let me know that I was letting him down when I left to conduct interviews. Most were with independent businessmen who were being hounded by the authorities, the closest I could find to political opposition in a town dominated by Gazprom.

Returning late in the afternoon, I found the men again sitting around the coffee table, now together with the young graduate student, and working on beer. I’d soon learn that they’d spent the entire day there. When I joined them, they were recalling their previous trips to various parts of Siberia. Only then did it dawn on me why they seemed to have done no work when we’d driven into the tundra the previous day: there was no work to be done. They were on a kommandirovka.

Literally, kommandirovka means nothing more than “business trip.” Actually, it’s often an excuse to drink oneself silly while away from wives, girlfriends, parents and other mundane realities. Given the opportunity to travel, ostensibly for work, Victor and Alexander jumped at it as they’d obviously often done in the past. Sitting in their tiny, stuffy room drinking all day seemed like misery to me, but that’s why they’d come to Novoi Urengoi. This time I couldn’t even persuade them to leave for dinner.

Journalists everywhere may be notorious for heavy drinking on their frequent kommandirovki, but I’ve rarely seen Westerners put away as much as some of my Russian colleagues can. Arriving at a Moscow airport at eight o’clock one morning in 2005 for a trip to cover parliamentary elections in Chechnya, when that region was still ruined by war and extremely dangerous, I was perhaps foolishly surprised to find a table of journalists knocking back bottle after bottle of beer. On the rickety Soviet-era plane to the neighboring Stavropol region, some continued drinking in the Russian tradition, which favors cognac during air travel. One Russian photographer in particular, who worked for an international news agency, excelled in upholding the tradition. Pressing his bottle of cheap Armenian brandy on random passersby, he appeared to take refusals from those bold enough to decline as personal insults. Those who agreed were also loudly chastised for taking swigs he invariably judged to be too small.

My trip had been arranged by the government to show off its claims that Chechnya’s new pro-Kremlin authorities were stabilizing the region, which the Russian army had bombed into the Stone Age. No one then knew it would be the start of a remarkable drive that would rebuild the capital Grozny from a pile of rubble in a few short years. Meanwhile, in Stavropol, we boarded several small buses for the two-hour drive into Chechnya in a convoy escorted by special-forces troops riding in Soviet-era jeeps. The drunk photographer continued drinking. Polishing off the last of his cognac, he pleaded with others for beer before falling asleep, his head resting on the shoulder of a BBC correspondent who, despite nervously practicing lines for an upcoming live report, was too polite to ask the slumbering man to move. Jolted awake on the potholed road, the photographer tried convincing the driver to stop for more alcohol despite the potential danger from snipers and lack of any place to buy it. When we arrived at our first polling station in an elementary school, a tiny trickle of locals dressed in their Sunday best was also arriving to cast ballots while commandos toting massive automatic rifles set up a perimeter around the area to protect us. Wary of the watchful eyes of government officials and informers in a village where everyone knew everyone else, residents recited admiration for the pro-Moscow administration, repeating government pronouncements almost verbatim.

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 skyrocketing 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.

When I was a teenager, my dad confidently assured me that sickness from drinking to excess is so unpleasant that I’d never want to do it more than a few times in my life. Although I’m still struggling with that lesson, my father apparently learned it for good from his experiences in Moscow. At work on a Columbia University dissertation about the Soviet legal system, he spent some of his days visiting courtrooms. He bunked with a humorless roommate in a single room of a dormitory that formed one of the sprawling university building’s wings. It went without saying that the roommate had been selected for his political loyalty, but other students my father befriended in the dormitory were far livelier and more interesting. Nevertheless, he made certain to be out on the evening of the day they got their monthly stipends, and took pains to remain away at late as possible. That was to avoid being given a water glass full of vodka to drink, an inevitability if he arrived before his friends finished their evening in the usual way, passed out on their beds or the floor, often stacked like cordwood and stinking of vomit.

Although the stipends were small, just over a ruble a day, the de rigueur party that followed featured sausage and cheese in addition to bottles of vodka. The revelry set the students back nearly half their stipends, forcing them to exist largely on free bread from the cafeteria for the last ten days of the month. They washed their meals down with “white nights” tea—hot water—part of a diet so grim that when they got their next stipends, there was no question they would need to celebrate again by drinking themselves into oblivion. So it went, in the traditional Russian pattern that had startled Western visitors to Russia in the sixteenth century: famine broken by loud, drunken feasts.

Brezhnev’s ascent ended any hope that the creaking Soviet economy, which had slightly improved under Khrushchev, would be further reformed. Instead, spending on the military ballooned, and the only way the Kremlin could alleviate the consequences of that and even more crippling effects of the central planning system was to permit more goods and services to reach the vast majority of Soviets by closing its eyes to at least some of the growing corruption. Pilfering from state stores enabled shopkeepers to exchange cigarettes and food for, say, medical checkups or car tires. Proliferation of that kind of arrangement, which had previously only permeated the top levels of the state bureaucracy, enabled Brezhnev’s regime to plod on more or less unchanged until his death in 1982. However, it also reinforced the indolence and cynicism that had become widespread.

After Khrushchev freed millions of political prisoners from the Gulag labor-camp system following Stalin’s death in 1953, there was no going back to the tyrant’s terror. Instead, the bleak Brezhnev era became mired in self-absorption. During the zastoi—the stagnation, as the period became known—Soviets showed outward loyalty to the Party but were largely free to criticize it among family and friends in the relative safety of their very cramped kitchens. Alcohol dulled the monotony of life.

People used a sign language to discuss drinking on the street. Two fingers held at the neck meant someone was looking for someone else to split a bottle and its cost; three fingers meant three people. The state retail market being what it was, alcohol also became a hot commodity on the booming black market. A journalist named Vitaly Korotich—who would become the editor of the groundbreaking magazine Ogonyok, the Soviet equivalent of Life magazine, which began crusading for reform under Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika years later—recently described the central role vodka played during those drab years:

As a means of smoothing relations, as a bribe, an aperitif, a souvenir, medicine and, well, whatever else, vodka fulfilled many life goals. It ceased being just an alcoholic drink and became one of the most important aspects of Soviet life… The phrase, “You won’t get anywhere without a half-liter,” entered the professional lexicon. That’s how we lived.¹⁶

Switching off became the easiest form of protest under a regime that still crushed dissent. Although his work became widely known only after his death in 1990, writer Venedikt Erofeev has since become one of the intellectual figures most closely associated with the drunks of the zastoi. Expelled from Moscow State University during his second year in the 1950s, Erofeev drifted around the Soviet Union, working a series of odd jobs that included laying telephone cables near Moscow. His prose poem Moskva-Petushki, which was completed in 1970 and first distributed as samizdat—self-published literature passed around in secret—describes an alcohol-soaked, hallucinatory day in the life of a character named Venichka Erofeev (after the diminutive form of Venedikt). Ostensibly the account of his train trip from Moscow to the suburban town of Petushki, eighty miles to the northwest, the short work is loaded with literary allusions and celebrated in Russia today for its brilliantly comic depiction of the Brezhnev era, which was so perversely stultified that severe alcoholism appeared to be the norm. Erofeev opens with his protagonist trying to remember the previous day, indistinguishable from most others.

I mean, as soon as I came out onto Savyelov Station, I had a glass of Zubrovka [vodka] for starters, since I know from experience that as an early-morning tipple, nobody’s dreamed up anything better so far.

Anyway, a glass of Zubrovka. Then after that—on Kalayev Street—another glass, only not Zubrovka this time, but coriander vodka. A friend of mine used to say coriander had a dehumanizing effect on a person, i.e., it refreshed your parts but weakened your spirit. For some reason or other it had the opposite effect on me, i.e., my spirit was refreshed, while my parts went all to hell. But I do agree it’s dehumanizing, so that’s why I topped it up with two glasses of Zhiguli beer, plus some Albe-de-dessert [port] straight from the bottle, in the middle of Kalayev Street.

Of course, you’re saying: come on, Venya, get on with it—what did you have next? And I couldn’t say for sure. I remember—I remember quite distinctly in fact—I had two glasses of Hunter’s vodka, on Chekhov Street. But I couldn’t have made it across the Sadovy ring road with nothing to drink, I really couldn’t. So I must’ve had something else.¹⁷

Venichka has been fired from his job as a cable fitter after accidentally having sent out graphs charting his co-workers’ productivity relative to the amount of alcohol they’d consumed.

Before my time, our production schedule looked like this: in the morning we would sit and play three-card brag for money (you know how to play brag?). Okay. After that we’d get up, unroll a drum of cable and lay it underground. Then, obviously, we’d sit back down and kill some time, each in his own way. I mean, everyone has a different temperament, different aspirations; one would be drinking vermouth; another, slightly more basic, Fraîcheur eau-de-cologne; and the ones with a bit of class would be on the cognac [from] Sheremetyevo airport. Then we’d go to sleep.

And the next morning, well, first we’d sit down and have a drink of vermouth. Then we’d whip yesterday’s cable back up out of the ground and chuck it away, because it’d got soaked through, naturally.¹⁸

Venichka’s innovation is to do away with the charade of laying any cable at all. Now a celebrated literary hero, his recipes for alcoholic drinks are the stuff of urban legend. (“Tears of a Komsomol [Communist Party youth group] Girl: lavender water, 15g; Verbena herbal lotion, 15g; mouthwash, Forest Water eau-de-Cologne, 30g; nail varnish, 2g; mouthwash, 150g; lemonade, 150g.”)

Literature aside, vodka production increased eightfold between 1940 and 1980.¹⁹ The stagnation period, zastoinyi, came to be jokingly referred to as zastolnyi, or “at the table,” where most people consume their vodka. The authorities began cracking down on production in earnest only after the death of Brezhnev, a serious drinker, in 1982. He was replaced by former KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who is believed to have initiated his own reforms, including those involving alcohol, because he had unique knowledge about the Soviet Union’s deep-seated problems, many of which were hidden from the people. Soon sales of liquor, as well as cologne and other liquids containing alcohol, were forbidden before 11:00 a.m.²⁰

But it wasn’t until the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 that the Kremlin began waging serious war against alcoholism. Believed to have been encouraged by hard-liners in his regime, Gorbachev launched a major antialcohol campaign in May of that year, when the government enacted a series of resolutions called Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism. Alcohol was banned at official functions, Party members and officials who visibly abused it were dismissed and liquor production was drastically curtailed. Millions of people were persuaded to join a temperance group called the All-Union Voluntary Society for the Struggle for Sobriety. Alcohol prices were increased and its sale was banned before 2:00 p.m.²¹ Even today, former Soviets shake with anger when they recall the closure of distilleries and the destruction of some of the USSR’s best vineyards in Ukraine and Moldova. Although alcohol consumption declined that year, the policy soon proved to be an utter disaster.

As supplies dwindled, mass fights broke out in the huge queues that grew ever longer outside the increasingly fewer stores that sold alcohol. People began producing moonshine at home, mostly from sugar and yeast, which led to widespread shortages and rationing of those commodities. Many who weren’t already doing so turned to anything containing alcohol, including window-cleaning solvents and de-icing solution for airplanes, to quench their thirst.²²

Historian Sergei Roy writes that drug addiction grew along with the huge spike in alcohol poisonings. “I mean lethal ones, for who would bother to count the near-lethal writhing of wretches who felt sorry they’d survived? The number of lethal alcoholic poisonings grew fourfold immediately after the 1985 order, as desperate citizens started drinking anything remotely believed to contain alcohol: eau de cologne, lotions, toothpaste, glue, shoeshine, furniture varnish, nail varnish.”²³

Jokes multiplied along with hatred for Gorbachev: “Do you have this cologne?” a man at a barbershop asks, then exhales toward his barber. Shaking his head, the barber breathes back on his client. “No, only this kind.”

Another man who has been waiting for hours in a queue for vodka decides to go to the Kremlin to give Gorbachev a thrashing instead. When he returns an hour later, a comrade still waiting in line asks how it went. The man shakes his head. “That line was even longer.”

Gorbachev’s antialcoholism campaign was far from the first failure of its kind. Previous attempts ran into a central dilemma: although successive governments wanted to reduce alcohol production, they depended on liquor taxes for revenue, a paradox dating back four centuries, when such levies were first introduced as a way to reduce drinking. Gorbachev restricted vodka sales so that Russian workers would help shore up communism by returning to the assembly line, but his policy actually hastened the Soviet Union’s demise because it also caused a substantial drop in government revenues. Vodka taxes had at one point provided a quarter of the entire Soviet budget when prices for Moscow’s other main cash cow, oil for foreign export, began hitting all-time lows. By printing more money to make up some of the difference, the Kremlin did even more to worsen the inflation that accelerated the communist downfall.²⁴

The drive to increase revenues has undermined the goal of decreasing alcohol consumption since Ivan III established the first state alcohol monopoly in 1475. Ivan the Terrible introduced the first state kabak, or tavern, in the 1530s, and they were soon producing and selling spirits in major towns throughout the principality of Muscovy.²⁵ Since profits went directly to the state treasury, officials were inclined to promote drinking.²⁶ The English ambassador Giles Fletcher observed in 1591 that the tsar encouraged his subjects to drink in state-owned taverns, where “none may call them forth whatsoever cause there be, because he hindereth the emperor’s revenue.”²⁷ Peter the Great later took the opposite approach, attempting to increase taxation by abolishing a state monopoly on alcohol production and encouraging private distillation. By time Catherine the Great assumed the throne in 1762, alcohol taxes accounted for a third of the state budget.

And so on, through the reigns of Alexander I, Nicholas I and others. By 1862, the state was getting half its revenue from alcohol taxes.²⁸ At the time, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, considered the father of Russia’s revolutionary movement, denounced his colleagues for supporting the vodka tax and thereby sacrificing their duty to “promote national honor, the moral welfare of the nation, justice and fairness… The only reason for its existence is monetary. Its sole purpose and concern is money, money, money.”²⁹

The issue prompted another great moralist, Chernyshevsky’s contemporary Fyodor Dostoevsky, to plan a novel he wanted to call The Drunkards. He later folded its characters into Crime and Punishment, whose Semyon Marmeladov remains one of Russia’s best-known alcoholic archetypes. The drunks of Russian literature such as Marmeladov and Venichka Erofeev tend to be viewed sympathetically, as people whose spirits are crushed by the social inequities of an oppressive state. They are variants of the “little man” in Russian literature, among them an impoverished and derided clerk at the center of Nikolai Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.” Having scrimped and saved to buy a cherished new coat only to have it stolen, he dies from illness soon after a high-ranking official he approaches for help dresses him down for wasting his time.

Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov, another low-ranking clerk, speaks in a ludicrously high-flown manner: his sole, pathetic gesture of dignity. The protagonist, Raskolnikov, first meets him in a tavern, where he observes that Marmeladov’s hands are dirty, his nails black and his filthy coat has one remaining button.

His face was bloated from continual drinking and his complexion was yellow, even greenish. From between his swollen eyelids his little reddish slits of eyes glittered with animation. But there was something very strange about him; his eyes had an almost rapturous shine, they seemed to hold both intelligence and good sense, but gleams of something like madness showed in them as well.³⁰

Having squandered his destitute family’s money on drink and pawned his uniform, Marmeladov is afraid to return home, a tiny room he occupies with his wife and three small children. He confesses that he has just begged thirty more kopeks from a beloved older daughter, who has been sold into prostitution to raise money:

“And surely she needs them for herself, now, eh? What do you think, my dear sir? Now she must take care to be always neat and clean. And that neatness, that special cleanness, costs money, you understand… Well sir, and I, her own father, took those thirty kopeks of hers for drink! And I am drinking it, sir! I have already drunk it all!… Now who could be sorry for a wretch like me, eh?”³¹

No one, he concludes, rationalizing his behavior by claiming a thirst for suffering, the Russian crucible for spiritual purity. Like other alcoholics in Russian literature, Marmeladov’s character is comic, but his fate is more tragic than pathetic, his alcoholism a grotesque example of the humiliation to which characters are driven by the highly bureaucratic nature of St. Petersburg life. If Raskolnikov revolts against poverty by committing the novel’s central crime, his parallel Marmeladov accepts his fate, suffers and dies.

Alcoholism continued spreading and the quality of vodka declining until the introduction of yet another state vodka monopoly in 1894 under the reforming Finance Minister Sergei Witte. During the so-called fourth liquor monopoly, hundreds of state distilleries, which maintained higher standards than even the top private producers, were built. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the government banned sales of all privately produced alcoholic drinks under a dry law meant to combat drunkenness among soldiers. Vodka continued to be sold widely nevertheless, chiefly in expensive restaurants, since the measure was largely seen as a ban aimed at the lower classes.³²

After the Revolution, the Bolsheviks put all private producers out of business by appropriating their assets. Some were transferred to Moscow State Wine Warehouse no. 1, which later formed the basis of the famed Kristall distillery.

Although Lenin reduced alcohol production, Stalin lifted all restrictions by 1925, and deaths from drinking soon surpassed their prewar level.³³ The dictator’s decision was explicitly meant to raise revenues that would enable the communist regime to refuse foreign investment. “What’s better, the yoke of foreign capitalism or the sale of vodka?” Stalin is said to have asked. “Naturally, we will opt for vodka.”³⁴ His policy came to be known as pyanyi budzhet (“drunken budget”).

Half a century later, historian Sergei Roy wrote, the Soviet Union’s “alcoholic nightmare” could be explained by the role that liquor, along with oil, played as the “backbone of the nation’s budget.”

Virtually all types of consumer goods were in short supply in the shops, but there was hardly ever a shortage of vodka, and people bought it not only because they were thirsty (although the nation’s innate thirst should by no means be underrated) but because there was little else to buy. Where supplies of vodka ran dry, all economic life came to a halt: The budget had no money to pay the workers’ wages with.

Some economists pointed out that the Marxian “commodity-money-commodity” formula had degenerated into the “vodka-money-vodka” form especially adapted to the Soviet way of life. I’d go a step further and insist that vodka was money, or zhidkaya valyuta, “liquid currency,” as it was commonly called. Especially in the rural areas ordinary money would not buy you anything, while vodka—anything you might wish. On our trips through Siberia we regularly carried a goodish supply of spirt, or pure alcohol—practically the only means of obtaining transportation. With enough spirt, you could travel by helicopter even—always provided you could find a pilot sober enough to fly it, that is. Or take a babushka in a village who had to have her small plot of land plowed for planting potatoes, her principal subsistence crop. She just had to save a bottle of samogon hooch (vodka would be regarded as luxury) to pay the tractor driver, or her plot would go unplowed.³⁵

Despite the widespread public drunkenness, it was all but impossible to buy vodka in Moscow shops when I first visited in 1991, more than three years after Gorbachev’s antialcoholism campaign had ended. The scarcity reflected the economy’s mortally crippled condition. Except for the little Beriozki stores that sold selected products to foreigners and privileged Soviets for foreign currency, which was illegal for most to possess, many shelves remained almost completely empty of everything that summer. (Outdoor markets, called rynki, were different. Part of a loosely regulated gray market run with the help of criminal groups, they sold fresh produce for higher prices.) The few shops that did stock at least some products were so foul-smelling from (I presumed) mold and rot that I barely managed the arduous task of actually buying something when I tried. It required jostling through weary crowds crammed around display cases to glimpse what happened to be on sale. Next you determined how much you wanted and multiplied the number or weight by the price shown. God forbid you would have to ask an invariably dour salesperson, who would shake her head before reluctantly scribbling the figure on a scrap of paper. Then you stood in line elsewhere in the store for a cashier using an ancient register to ring up a receipt that you would bring back to the original display. After more pushing and more waiting, a salesperson would eventually reluctantly cut the very inferior cheese or sausage you’d chosen.

Gorbachev’s relaxation of the administrative coercion that had kept the Soviet economic system running, however wastefully, for seven decades was based on hope that freedom from the quotas and orders imposed by the state planning agency Gosplan—which left not even the production of toothpicks up to supply and demand—would encourage factory managers and other lower-ranking officials who oversaw production lines to run their own industries more efficiently. After all, the logic went, they knew what needed to be done better than their superiors. But reducing central control actually helped bring the system down. The government set artificially low prices; when available, products were very cheap. The result was that enterprises had little incentive to produce goods and stores had little more to sell them. However, there was huge incentive to steal—that is, to steal from the state.

Much of Muscovites’ time went into trying to guess where to get what they wanted or needed. For vodka, it was often restaurants because they still received supplies. I did best at the Rossiya Hotel, a huge, ghastly 1970s cube neighboring the Kremlin. Approaching the kitchen’s back entrance, which faced the Moscow River and where one or more waiters were invariably loitering, dragging on cigarettes, you’d ask how much they would be willing to sell, then haggle over the price. A bottle cost roughly the equivalent of a dollar in rubles, several times more expensive than the official price. Pshenichnaia, or wheat vodka, was among the smoothest to be had, and you could often get several bottles. If a restaurant failed, you’d try another or a store’s back entrance.

Foreigners had the option of frequenting one of a handful of seedy hard-currency bars, most of which were in hotels from which ordinary Soviets were barred. Burly KGB bouncers stood at the doors, stopping any locals bold enough to attempt to enter. Russians told me they could differentiate by looking at people’s eyes: those of foreigners weren’t dulled by weariness and resignation. Among the most popular haunts was the smoky bar in the basement of the 1970s Intourist Hotel near the Kremlin, now the site of the Ritz-Carlton. There, Western would-be entrepreneurs seeking business deals mingled with shady criminal types, prostitutes and foreign students. It wasn’t a place where you’d want to spend much time, but you could buy as many big cans of Löwenbräu beer as you wanted if you could pay for them in dollars. And some foreign embassies gave weekly parties. One of the most popular was held at the German embassy, where most foreign passports got you in and beers cost two dollars.

Arriving in Moscow had transformed me from an impoverished college student into royalty. In addition to the relative wealth my few dollars conferred on me, stories of my life in the land of freedom and plenty made me interesting to Russians no matter how boring I actually was. Utterly cynical about their government and society and no longer afraid of punishment by the authorities, the young people I met were keen to snap up any bit of knowledge I could offer about the West. The collapse of the Soviet system’s mores and strictures, which took place far more quickly than most people realized at the time, gave them a great sense of personal liberty. Free time was spent foraging for food and drink to serve at parties, which were usually held in the apartments of parents summering at their dachas. Their crumbling world made life a great adventure.

Outside Moscow, alcohol was even harder to come by. Visiting nearby Zagorsk, the site of one of Russia’s four most important monasteries, I spent a day exploring the beautiful town before spotting a state restaurant that was miraculously open. I was with my friend Kolya—the young television correspondent with whom I’d soon travel to Vilnius—who persuaded a dark-haired waitress to seat us, which she did grudgingly, although we were the only patrons. Then she disappeared, leaving us to pore over a menu filled with a long list of the usual dishes: beef entrecôte, pilmeni (dumplings), bliny, borsch. Having made our choices, we waited ravenously for the waitress—in vain. After some time, it emerged that she and the rest of the staff were busy carting crates of beer from the kitchen to a van outside. Finally persuaded to approach our table, she patiently listened to our orders before sternly informing us that all the menu’s dishes were unavailable. What about starters? we asked hopefully. Those too. Okay, what about two beers? Now irritation blazed from her eyes. There was no beer.

Pointing to a waiter who was wheeling another load of crates out the door, Kolya adopted his sweetest tone, free of his usual irony in such cases. “Darling, can’t we just have a couple of bottles? We’ve traveled here all the way from Moscow; surely you wouldn’t want us to leave with a bad impression of your town.” His charm produced a compromise: two bowls of thin borsch grudgingly brought to our table.

The following year, 1992, when price controls were lifted and inflation skyrocketed, a dollar went from being worth twenty-seven rubles to two hundred, and the value would continue rising into the thousands. But now you could buy bottles of Pshenichnaia vodka from any number of Muscovites, many of them elderly, who desperately crowded around the entrances to train stations, metro stations and pedestrian underpasses by the hundreds, hawking food, drink, used clothes, toothbrushes, anything they could sell to make a few kopeks.

If alcoholism was a Soviet nightmare, it approaches the level of Armageddon today. Like computer-chip capacities, Russians’ alcohol intake has almost doubled every decade since the 1970s. After years of talk about imposing a new state monopoly on spirits (which private manufacturers would be obliged to use for producing their liquor), the government announced plans in 2010 to quadruple the tax on vodka over the following three years, a hike that would double the minimum vodka price to about six dollars per half liter, roughly a pint. This time the aim appears to be less to fill the treasury’s coffers—for which oil and gas are now far more important—than to finally do something about the drinking that’s helping drive the average male life expectancy down to a level lower than North Korea’s at at time when recent tax increases on cigarettes have helped push the number of smokers to historic lows in the United States.

However, few believe the authorities can withstand the centuries-old temptation to earn as much as possible from the new vodka taxes. Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, long considered the government’s leading liberal, recently encouraged his fellow countrymen to smoke and drink more, saying they were the best things they could do to help the economy emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis. “Those who drink,” he said, “are giving more to help solve social problems [by] boosting demographics, developing other social services and upholding birth rates.”

There may well be another major explanation for the government’s failure to take effective measures to stop the rampage of alcohol: its unwillingness to face the crippling problem with anything like serious resolve or action. Or the authorities may believe, as Catherine the Great is said to have remarked, that it’s easier to rule a drunken public.

In any case, higher prices prompted by the new taxes—along with restrictions on nighttime sales and advertising—are already driving more Russians to follow the old pattern of drinking dangerous and unregulated samogon and other poisonous liquor surrogates. Historian Alexander Nikishin is among those who maintain that establishing a monopoly is the only real way to fight the country’s crippling alcoholism. But Nikishin also believes the lack of “enough honest people in government” would make it impossible to exert real control over alcohol production and consumption. “The more control there is in our country,” he says, “the more corruption there is. Vodka can be your friend or enemy, depending on the authorities’ attitudes. You can make a killing from it and lose your people.”

But the government would have to do far more than simply control alcohol production and sales to seriously change the role drinking plays in Russia. Leaving aside the cold weather, that old justification for drinking to excess, alcohol abuse has partly been an “easy” escape from the individual’s pawn-like role in society. More than just the physical difficulties of climate and geography, it’s the state’s crushing oppression, the corruption, the virtual lack of hope for change that are still contributing to Russia’s traditional fatalism and resignation. The drinking done by the scientists I met in Novoi Urengoi surprised me at the time, but it was nothing unusual.

The morning I left, Victor, who’d drunk to the point of collapse, was in one of his rare sober moments. He apologized profusely. “Don’t think badly of me,” he appealed. My assurance that I wouldn’t was genuine: I sympathized with him as a victim of his circumstances. Some of the drunks I met in Russia, including several of my friends, were sensitive, intelligent people who’d lost control of their lives or never really had it.

As I was leaving for the airport, Victor repeated his invitation for me to visit his home in Khanty-Mansiisk. “We’ll drink vodka together!” he promised as enticement.