A Russian border-patrol officer drinks vodka while lying in a fountain at a Moscow park. Alexey Sazonov / AFP / Getty Images
By Andrei Litvinov
(with Darya Guseva)
When it comes to lost causes, attempts to wean Russians
off their booze would seem to rank at the very top. But that’s precisely what President
Dmitry Medvedev is trying to do. Last week he kicked off a new
anti-alcohol campaign aimed at cutting the nation's per capita consumption of alcohol by nearly a quarter by 2012.
It's a quirky battle to fight, but the country does
have an unequivocally serious predilection for the sauce. Russians currently
drink about 18 liters (19 quarts) a year, more than double the 8 liters (8.4 quarts) deemed
safe by the World Health Organization (WHO). With each additional liter, adds
the WHO, men can subtract 11 months from their average life expectancy. Women can
subtract four months.
The latest move to catch Russia’s “green serpent” has a
three-pronged strategy: a media campaign, restrictions on beer consumption, and
strict penalties for selling to minors. Russian officials plan to set up more
than 500 health centers by the end of the year, complete with Soviet-era tactics like drawings of
cirrhosis-stricken livers on their walls. Outside the government, a grassroots
organizing group called Our People plans to launch its own anti-vice campaign of
online videos and flash mobs. It intends to send crowds out to gather around
unsuspecting smokers on the street, walking alongside them and admonishing them
to quit. It's still working out a strategy for scaring alcoholics. If its targets are already drunks, they will likely be harder to spook if they're in their cups.
Even with such
aggressive measures, it’s hardly the most ambitious campaign Russians has ever
launched against drinking. Former leader Mikhail Gorbachev got alcohol
sales to decline by 60 percent (although, it should be noted, that drop was
partly offset by an off-the-books boom in moonshine and cologne). The official numbers
revealed an impressive bottom line. In the second half of the 1980s, Russian
officials say, the policies saved more than 1 million lives. Still, that achievement
came with its own costs: the government had no qualms about hacking up
vineyards, for example. At the same time, the suddenly scarce alcohol supply
often led to long lines of exasperated customers prone to brawling.
Other more
recent attempts have merely been brushed off. Three years ago, a group of young
Russians organized a sort of vigilante vice squad to single out and shame
merchants who sold alcohol to minors. Supported by the Moscow city administration, the Solar Circle movement, as they called themselves, held rallies, picketed, and slapped
leaflets on the shop doors of guilty establishments. They piqued media interest
at first, but the momentum soon fizzled. Likewise, Russians have not grumbled
that a ban on drinking beer in the street, imposed back in 2005, has gone
essentially unenforced.
Does this new push stand a chance? Some critics say that,
while admirable, it hardly addresses the biggest culprit of all: vodka. “The
main problem is the availability of hard liquor,” says Aleksandr Nemtsov, a top
Russian expert on alcohol policy at the Moscow Psychiatric Research Institute. Some
70 percent of alcohol consumption in Russia is of the hard stuff, primarily vodka. And no one has any bright ideas on how to wean Russia off its most celebrated commodity.
One attempt, tried in the mid-1990s, substituted beer as a less intoxicating non-liquor alternative. The more people drank beer, thought officials, the less
they would drink vodka. Instead, “beer has become a gateway opening the way to
alcoholism for teenagers,” says Oleg Zykov, a member of the Public Chamber, a
government advisory body made up of public representatives. The earlier
people start down that route, the more likely they are to end up hitting the
hard stuff on a regular basis and grappling with alcoholism problems later.
People drink just as much of their precious vodka as ever.
If the new movement achieves anything, it might simply be to undo that damage. Now the state is attempting to limit the beer boom, considering a measure that would increase excise taxes on beer almost threefold in 2010. The hope, advocates say, is that
people will drink less beer if the cheap varieties go up in price from 20
rubles (63 U.S. cents) to 25 to 28 rubles (79 to 88 cents). Critics like Vadim Drobiz, head of
the Center for Research in the Federal and Regional Liquor Markets, aren’t so
confident. Raising prices is futile, he says, because alternative products will
immediately flood the market.
So, too, will bootleg products. The major distilleries
have a big stake in black-market alcohol, according to Pavel Shapkin,
head of the Center for Development of a National Alcohol Policy. Shapkin says
there is currently enough production capacity in Russia to put out three times more
vodka than the amount bought and sold in the formal market. Why? The
secret is simple: excise taxes on vodka go to the regional governments, which
are incentivized to produce alcohol. Often, he says, plants operate openly
during one shift, then transition into producing illegal vodka on the next.
Still, for now, Russians seem to support the government’s
new approach. As the National
Center for the Study of
Public Opinion reported last week, 65 percent of the population say they are in
favor the new measures─especially those that restrict alcohol sales to those under 21. (Right now, the drinking age is 18.) That may not be enough to change the addicts' drinking patterns, but it could be enough to stop younger Russians heading down the same drunken path.
Darya Guseva contributed to this article, originally published in NEWSWEEK's Russian-language partner, Russky Newsweek. It was translated by Steven Shabad.
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