War On….. Alcohol?

“Soviet society revealed signs of acute stress. One was hyper-alcoholism” (Freeze, 444).

When we picture someone from Russia, I think many of us see a beer-bellied man with a 5 o’clock shadow, rosy cheeks, hazy eyes, and a half empty bottle of vodka next to him. At least that’s what I see. So I was curious to learn that the Soviet government had recognized society’s alcoholic tendencies and attempted to change them.

Economically, alcohol raised revenue, which wasn’t a bad thing. Alcohol sales jumped to 77% in the 70s, and consumption had doubled from 1955 to 1979 (Freeze, 444 and The Atlantic). However, it also raised infant mortality because babies were dying of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), and that was very bad. Even today, most cases of FAS come from babies born in the Balkans region of Europe. On top of that, people weren’t having many children, so the birth rate was lower than the death rate, and that sparked the government’s need to change something about the alcoholism throughout the state.

Similarly to the way we see anti-drug posters/campaigns here in the US, the Soviet government attempted to limit alcohol consumption by creating posters to show what a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Russian looks like. The picture below is one example, but you can find many more here.

Aside from the government, civilians saw the need for laws against alcoholism due to the harmful affect it had on society.  People pressed for anti-alcoholism laws to be made official and unified. Many of those were well-educated and wealthy citizens who made attempts to ‘cleanse’ Soviet society during the 1960s. Professor Gertsenzon called drunkenness “incompatible with socialist social relations” and talked about how drunkenness and alcoholism were poisoning the workplace and resident life of many Soviets. Business owners even thought to reduce alcoholism to embarrassment by giving out wages in something shaped like a bottle of Russian vodka.

{During the 80s in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev will institute a “dry law” and other anti-alcohol campaigns, but we can talk about that when we get there!}

Alcoholism is still a major problem in Russia today despite all of the anti-alcohol campaign throughout the Soviet Union. More than 30% of all deaths in Russia were alcohol related in 2012. Here is a pdf from the World Health Organization from 2014 that does a good job of breaking the alcohol use and misuse in the Russian Federation.

Images: here and here

Freeze, Gregory. “Russia A History” 3rd Edition.