The Great Russian Saloon Series / The Lush's Paradise
Solovyov, Vladimir
THE GREAT RUSSIAN SALOON SERIES THE LUSH'S PARADISE by Vladimir Solovyov Russian drunkenness, one of the most classic and commonplace of subjects, is again attracting attention in connection...
...Dostoyevsky thought the Jews were doing just that by selling Christians vodka distilled from raisins...
...But about one thing they can be certain: its traditional place in Russia notwithstanding, alcoholism in the past few decades has surged dramatically, with sales of alcohol five times what they were in the early fifties...
...But there is more to it than fisticuffs...
...One liter of vodka now costs $11, more than a day's wages...
...Why this inconsistency...
...to 7 p.m...
...Particularly spectacular is the rural landscape at night, with blue smoke rising from each hut...
...Thus a superpower whose military potential is at least equal to, if not greater than, that of the United States, has a life span and infant mortality rate comparable to that of an underdeveloped country...
...But even these figures are understated-probably very much so-since they do not take into account the production and consumption of moonshine alcohol...
...Infant mortality is three times greater than in Western Europe, and life expectancy is six years lower...
...Another time, I was in a store that sold kerosene and a young man brought in a can, saying he wanted it filled with twenty liters of "skull and cross-bones" (denatured alcohol...
...not surprising that the greatest accumulation of drunks is usually to be found at bus stations and railroad terminals, near the liquor stores and food shops where with equal ease one can make a short-lived friendship or get into a fist fight...
...It is not just individuals but an entire nation that have become drunks, and one can only imagine the effect this will have on future generations...
...can easily be overcome with the help of the black market...
...Soviet geneticists are disturbed not so much by the moral dissolution as by the degeneration of the Russian genotype...
...THE GREAT RUSSIAN SALOON SERIES THE LUSH'S PARADISE by Vladimir Solovyov Russian drunkenness, one of the most classic and commonplace of subjects, is again attracting attention in connection with a startling new phenomenon of Soviet life...
...According to Soviet statistics, about 40 percent of the drunks in Russia do their drinking on the streets or at entrances to buildings.* It's therefore *Since drinking on a Russian scale at public establishments is forbidden by law, there are no great saloons in the Soviet Union...
...For example, watchmen in morgues drink the formalin that is supposed to be used for cadavers...
...Judging from everything else going on today, the current "great leap" in the incidence of alcoholism is a kind of litmus paper -a result and indicator of the ever stagnant realities of Russian life...
...Are the leaders in the Kremlin worried by this...
...Eventually, we reached Odessa, but instead of landing at the civilian airport, we came down on the military airfield where the pilot had done duty before being transferred to Aeroflot for drunkenness...
...It is hard to say what people drink in the USSR...
...In Stalin's terminology, the close-knit family of Soviet peoples is headed by the "older brother"-the Russian people...
...Thus Russians, who constitute only 20 percent of the population of Georgia, include 80 percent of Georgia's registered alcoholics...
...He could still fly a plane (more or less), but he couldn't walk on his own two feet...
...And another: "Trade your bread for booze and you'll have a happier life...
...After the subsequent party, many of the workers went blind, and six died...
...I once spent four hours on a local flight from Ochakov to Odessa-a flight that was supposed to take one hour...
...One American journalist asked me: "If Stalin could take away the peasants' land, cows, and pigs, isn't it obvious that he-or, today, Brezhnev-could have taken away the bottle as well...
...There, he was literally dragged out of the cockpit...
...One can also apply the theory of dissipation to the problem of Russian alcoholism from the other end...
...What is really amazing, though, is not the black market but the fact that the government itself has gone around its own laws and begun selling a new kind of vodka, Strelets-kaya (58 proof), that you can buy any time a liquor store is open...
...Nor is it all that unusual for a pilot to fly an airplane while drunk...
...Yes, drunkenness in Russia is practically universal, even among truck drivers (especially those on long runs), who devise various methods to conceal their drinking, including the chewing of nutmeg and coffee beans...
...There are many recipes for moonshine, ranging from the primitive sivukha, or raw brandy, to chacha, a fiery plum brandy good enough to please the palate of any gourmand...
...It is distilled everywhere...
...I specify "Russian" because, although there are no statistics on alcoholism broken down for the various Soviet nationalities, many other signs indicate that in this respect the Russians have moved well ahead of other Soviet peoples...
...This is a kind of voluntary tax...
...But neither Stalin nor Brezhnev did, nor could they have done so-for many reasons...
...The average Soviet consumes twice as much alcohol as the average American, and America is not among the soberest of nations...
...The economic gain, however, could not possibly offset the moral and physical damage wrought by alcoholism...
...The government has managed to lower the quality of the vodka it produces (vodka for export is not available even to Muscovites) precisely because most of the drunks are not choosy...
...American specialists, puzzled by the health crisis in the USSR, have been making all sorts of guesses as to its cause...
...but in the Urals city of Sverdlovsk you can hardly get into the city park in the summertime, what with all the drunks lying around...
...One saying on the subject goes: "There's no bread, so let's drink booze...
...Alcohol is an important source of income for the state, and limiting its production would mean a serious blow to the economy...
...Others drink eau de cologne, valerian, varnish, a glue called "B-F," and denatured alcohol...
...Here an important question arises: Is somebody making drunkards of the Russians...
...According to recent statistics for the Gorky region (where Academician Sakharov is now living in exile), in one year alone drunks committed 100 percent of the area's premeditated homicides, 72.6 percent of its serious assaults, and 53 percent of its robberies...
...Over the past decade, infant mortality has increased sharply (by one-third between 1970 and 1975, reaching 35.6 per 1,000) and life expectancy has dropped...
...Eugene Muslin of Radio Liberty has concluded that the Soviet rulers are following the "law of social dissipation," using alcohol (among other things) to divert, dissipate, or drain off the social aggression of the population...
...In fact, one-fifth of all robberies committed in the USSR are of liquor stores...
...A drunk on the streets of Tallin is a rarity...
...In its perverse way the government uses it to finance medical care and education, and can always raise it under the guise of combatting drunkenness...
...As the nineteenth-century poet Nekrasov observed, "the Russian man drinks instead of rebelling...
...A confiscated bottle of vodka, however, can always be replaced by a bottle of moonshine...
...Past increases in Russian alcoholism took place during bleak years of political repression...
...as the figures for the Third World are improving, for the Soviets they are getting worse-so much so, that in the mid-seventies data on infant mortality unexpectedly disappeared from the regular reports of the USSR Central Statistical Bureau...
...According to information from Literaturnaya Ga-zeta, a Moscow weekly, there has been an increase in the number of institutions for children with birth defects-especially those conceived during a binge...
...But what can we say about truck drivers and pilots when the world's first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, having come back safe and sound from space, flew a jet trainer while drunk and was killed when it crashed...
...On the people's scale of values, the bottle is more valuable than land...
...I have seen this myself, which is why I cite the example of Sverdlovsk instead of, say, Chelyabinsk where things would appear to be pretty much the same...
...When asked why he wanted so much, he explained he was going to a wedding, but assured us: "It's for the men...
...But whereVladimir Solovyov, a Russian-born historian and journalist, has just completed a book, Russian Paradoxes, in collaboration with his wife, Elena Klepikova...
...In Estonia's capital city of Tallin, when the local inhabitants see a drunk staggering along the street, they have no difficulty guessing who he is: "That's our older brother...
...Figures for other areas of the USSR are not much different...
...This is legitimate business, and the police wink at it...
...He diverts his rebellion from a prohibited area to a legal one...
...The Soviet propagandists bring the same charge against the czarist government, and say that present-day alcoholism is a vestige of the bourgeois past...
...The prudent majority does most of its drinking at home...
...A cab driver can get you a bottle of vodka at double the standard price any hour of the day or night...
...the weaker sex will drink vodka.'' Among the important changes on the map of Russian alcoholism is the sharp rise in drunkenness among women and children...
...I remember a tragic incident at a Leningrad plant where some workers discovered, on the side tracks, a tank • car full of methyl alcohol...
...But then Russian alcoholics are not really fastidious...
...In this view, the consumer of vodka can use it, at least for a time, to disperse his own fears, sense of humiliation, and feelings of social injustice...
...it is much easier to list what they don't drink...
...Once the land was taken away, there was nothing to replace it...
...Even the restriction on the sale of strong spirits (60 proof and up) to daytime hours (11 a.m...
...First we went far off course, to Kishinev in the Moldavian Republic...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
