Russia facing alcohol ‘crisis’
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia – His eyes are a bright and piercing blue, the same color as the jugs of Icicle-brand window cleaner he used to drink because it was twice as strong as vodka but five times cheaper.
Gennadi Shegurov, 45 years old and five years sober, isn’t sure how he survived his 20 years of drinking Icicle, along with untold quantities of antifreeze, beer, homemade vodka, brown bread soaked in shoe polish, industrial solvents, a rose-water cologne called Flight and a popular perfume called Triple.
“I drank like other people breathe,” said Shegurov, who was a prize-winning mathematician in college. “I had to look at newspapers to see what season it was. One time, the police stopped me and it took me half an hour to remember my name.”
By rights and statistics, Shegurov should be dead, another victim of a national addiction to alcohol that’s led doctors and government officials to worry that Russia – its current health and future population – is circling the drain.
Some 85 percent of Russian men drink regularly – they outnumber female drinkers by 5 to 1 – and on average they knock back a fifth of vodka every other day. And that doesn’t include the Russian intake of beer, wine and liqueur.
Drinking began to rise dramatically in the Soviet Union about 50 years ago, according to Dr. Alexander Nemtsov, one of Russia’s leading experts on alcoholism and the head of the psychiatric research department at the Russian Ministry of Health.
Per capita consumption in 1950 was the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of pure alcohol per year. By 1985 it had soared to 3.75 gallons per person. In recent years it’s climbed again, to 4 gallons per person, an all-time high for modern Russia.
The average Russian man, in large part due to alcohol abuse, won’t make it to his 59th birthday. Government figures show that an estimated 51,000 Russians died of alcohol poisoning last year, compared with more than 300 in the United States, which has twice the population of Russia, in the late 1990s. Not surprisingly, alcohol poisoning has its own category in the government’s cause-of-death charts.
A startling 34 percent of all deaths in Russia over the last decade – from murders and heart attacks to suicides and traffic accidents – were related to alcohol, said Nemtsov. The comparable figure for the United States in 1996 was 3.2 percent, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
“Drinking is how we live,” he said. “And now it’s also how we die.”
Nemtsov’s statistical studies show direct correlations between drinking and mortality – with sharp spikes in the mid-1980s as the Soviet Union began to fray, in the mid-1990s as inflation and economic uncertainty went haywire, and then again starting in 2001.
The Russian statistics bureau Goskomstat, the National Security Council and the United Nations all project a sharp decline in Russia’s population. The United Nations says the population, now just over 144 million, will fall to 112 million by midcentury.
Dr. Alexey Magalif, a prominent Moscow psychiatrist whose private clinic specializes in the treatment of alcoholism and depression, thinks Russian society has “very deep psychological problems in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. … And yes,” he adds, “I’d use the word crisis.”
“Drunkenness is a slow suicide,” Magalif said. “People are disillusioned and they feel they have no future. They feel abandoned by the state. They turn themselves off – and turn to drinking.”
The National Security Council worries that there won’t be enough citizens capable of serving in the military, patrolling the country’s far-flung borders and guarding its nuclear arsenal.
The drag on the economy will be ferocious as Russia loses startling numbers of able-bodied workers and consumers.