Posted on 11/22/2003 7:27:43 AM PST by Loyalist
Russia's renown for alcohol abuse is greater than ever-- now even kids are knocking 'em back, MARK MacKINNON reports. With a Canadian-backed treatment centre admitting children as young as 8, public officials blame more than the great vodka tradition. Those beer ads work a little too well
There's not much to see out the window on the train to Petushki, just endless rows of grey apartment blocks as the suburbs of Moscow roll by, and factories that are out of date, if not falling apart.
Few riding the rails on a Thursday afternoon seem to notice. As the crowded electric train, or elektrichka, picks up speed, the focus is not on what's outside the fogged-up windows, but on getting as drunk as possible, as quickly as possible.
Fists clutch bottles of Bochkarev and Baltika, two popular brands of Russian beer, as well as cans of Hooch, an imported mass-produced cocktail, and, of course, plastic cups of vodka, the beverage that's nearest and dearest to the Russian soul. It's 1:20 p.m. and nearly everyone on board is drinking. Few see anything strange about the early happy hour.
"From ancient times, the Russian people have always been like this. Our lives are governed by drinking," says 19-year-old Denis Gurkhin, an engineering student wielding a Bochkarev. He rides this train every day between school in the capital and Petushki, a small town about two hours to the southeast.
"I have a bottle of beer just to relax, but some people will drink a whole bottle of vodka and then forget where they're going. When I get on the train at 5 or 6 a.m. on the way to Moscow, there are already empty vodka bottles rolling in the aisles."
There's a literary tradition to drinking on the Moscow-Petushki line. Venedikt Yerofeyev, the country's beloved "vodka poet," wrote his cult novel Moscow Stations about drinking himself into oblivion while taking this very journey during the height of the Soviet era.
Drunk in the morning, the novel's hero starts out trying to find the Kremlin, misses the giant red castle in the centre of Moscow and ends up at Kursky station. He gets on the train to Petushki and promptly starts hallucinating about founding a new world order and declaring war on Norway. In the end, he never sees Petushki either, and recovers his senses only as the train is rolling back into Kursky.
To stocky Tatiana, who runs a lunch counter at the Kursky terminal, Moscow Stations isn't really fiction -- she has seen too many real-life drunks follow in Mr. Yerofeyev's stumbling footsteps. Unlike the average North American lunch counter, hers has vodka on the menu, and on most days, she says she goes through five bottles before noon. All around her, other vendors do equally brisk business.
"They start very early, maybe at 8 a.m., and they always order vodka," she says of her patrons, with a hint of disgust. "If someone orders anything else, I immediately know they're a foreigner."
As she speaks, two middle-aged men in sweaters come to the counter and order lunch. "You have 100-millilitre shot glasses?" they ask before considering the food options. After firing back a couple of shots each, they munch on some pickles and get on with the day.
On the way back from Petushki, a woman with maroon-coloured hair plunks down on an empty bench and reaches for a stranger's bottle of red wine. "What are we drinking to?" she asks, as though we all know her. There's no easy answer. "It's Thursday," someone offers weakly.
"To Thursdays, then!" she shouts, lifting a plastic cup of wine over her head before downing it in one long chug. Then she pours herself another and, minutes later, passes out with her head on a friend's shoulder, snoring fitfully the whole way back to Kursky station.
Watching the scene, 17-year-old Alexandre Levsov observes that "teenagers copy their parents, of course. There are a lot of drinking families."
But it's not just the vodka tradition that inspires them. For example, he admits that he's a sucker for commercials now seen all over Russian television. They depict healthy young people having a good time while drinking a much more recent staple of the drinker's diet: beer.
"Beer is more and more popular among young people," he explains, "and, of course, it's because of the commercials. You turn on your TV and you see people drinking beer. It affects young people. When I was a school kid, we never drank anything. Now even young kids drink."
As he speaks, a youngster behind him hoists a bottle of Bochkarev. "I'm in Grade 8!" he shouts to gales of laughter from all around.
Oleg Arkhipov doesn't look like an alcoholic.
He has wispy blond hair and a shy smile. Clad in a white turtleneck and blue jeans, he initially seems ordinary, if a bit quiet. Rather than speaking, he tugs impatiently on a woman's sleeve to let her know when he wants something. There are other hints that he has had a tougher life than most kids. He is short and thin -- so tiny, really, that he looks several years younger than he really is -- which happens to be 9.
Ghostly pale, as though he has lived his entire life in the shadows, Oleg is the youngest resident at a new alcoholism-rehabilitation clinic for children in Moscow. It was opened in April to deal with a newly acknowledged problem in Russia: the alcoholism that has so long been rampant in this society is getting to the next generation sooner than ever.
"There are enough beds out there for older teenagers, aged 15 to 18, but lately we've been seeing kids aged 8, 9, 10 and 11 who have these problems and they needed their own hospital," says Ina Bausheva, the centre's program director.
Oleg's, she says, is a typical case. He comes from what she, like Alexandre, calls a "drinking family." His mother is dead, no one knows who his father is. His grandmother raised him, and Oleg was surrounded by alcohol from a young age.
No one at the rehab centre knows just when Oleg started drinking and sniffing glue, but at a very young age he became dependent on both. He also started beating up his younger sister. Then he ran away from home and wound up at the clinic.
"He badly needs love and care. His eyes are always sad," Ms. Bausheva says. "But it's better for him here. I saw him smiling for the first time the other day when we took the kids to a museum. They had never been in a museum before." Even so, she believes there is something unique about Russian society and its addiction to drinking, something that makes it less likely here than anywhere else in the world that Oleg's story will have a happy ending.
The rehab centre, whose staff calls it "an experiment in progress," is partly funded by the Canadian International Development Agency. It has 12 live-in patients and 25 more who come from home. That's all it can expect right now, given that Russia has no juvenile justice system or any tradition of alternative punishment.
All the kids were sent to the clinic by a Moscow judge who believes in rehabilitation. Right now, he's a judicial lone wolf. Most street kids who get in trouble are either sent home, where their problems are often rooted, or face the adult court system. And the figures are rising. The number of children in Russia under 14 with drinking problems has almost doubled over the past decade. According to official statistics, more than 12,000 children have visited a hospital or "dry-out centre," and been diagnosed with an alcohol problem.
Dr. Bausheva believes the problem is much larger -- one recent study found that 30 per cent of Moscow school children have had at least 40 drinking episodes. She says there is no question that Russia's entrenched culture of drinking is inspiring more and more kids to pick up the bottle. But she also says the companies that sell the alcohol are deliberately fostering the trend.
The young men and women on the screen are all young, healthy, attractive and apparently affluent. They're headed to the dacha, or country home, for the weekend, and worried about how to make sure the visit is a memorable one. "What are we going to do tonight?" one asks. "Drink Klinskoye!" someone says in response. Problem solved, smiles all around.
Klinskoye is a popular local brand marketed by international brewing giant Sun Interbrew, which has come under heavy fire from Russian health experts for its youth-targeted advertising (other campaigns show young drinkers at the beach or the bowling alley). In fact, Russian television is now swamped with commercials for beer, a beverage now popular as an early-morning perk-up for many older Russians, who drink it in place of orange juice or coffee.
In one recent cartoon ad that raised eyebrows, a scientist bearing a strong resemblance to Albert Einstein struggles with his work until he drinks a glass of beer and all of a sudden makes a breakthrough.
For a culture only recently introduced to beer on a mass scale, promotion like this creates the impression the beverage is harmless, almost comparable to a soft drink. It's a view the government seems to share: Russian law doesn't even consider beer to be alcoholic. And to see that this notion "has become an accepted truth, you only have to look at children on the street, clutching bottles of beer," says Dr. Yevgenia Koshkina of the government-run Narcology Research Centre.
According to one estimate, about $400-million -- one-quarter of Russia's annual advertising budget -- is spent on beer commercials. As that spending has risen, so has consumption. The Health Ministry reported in 2001 that in the decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, the volume of pure alcohol consumed by the average Russian every year had jumped by more than half, to 8.3 litres from 5.3, despite a sharp decline in the national standard of living.
Teen drinking accounted for much of that growth. Dr. Koshkina estimates that teenage alcohol abuse has tripled since the parting of the Iron Curtain.
Deputy Health Minister Gennady Onishchenko, a strong anti-alcohol advocate, announced recently that the average age at which Russians take their first drink had dropped to 16 from 18 and that, to deal with the fallout, 100 new addiction-treatment clinics for teens have sprung up around the country. He put much of the blame on advertising like that done by Klinskoye.
Even some of those in the industry are uncomfortable with what's going on. "Beer commercials contribute a lot into alcoholism and low life expectancy," says Pavel Shapkin, chairman of the National Alcohol Association, a lobby group for producers. "Beer is advertised like a soda, like water. So it's no wonder children drink it from the early age. And from beer, they pass on to vodka faster."
It was a tragedy that could only happen in Russia.
Last weekend, residents of Volgodonsk, a bleak industrial city on the Don River, gathered to watch what amounted to the championship game of its favourite sport: vodka drinking. The winner was promised not only the respect of the drinking public but 10 litres of vodka. That prize was enough to draw 50 contenders for what was billed as the "Vodka Marathon."
The rules were simple: The vodka would be served in half-litre glasses, along with traditional Russian appetizers such as black bread, sausage and mustard. Whoever drank the most and stayed on his or her feet would be declared the champion.
Alexander Nakonechny soon left the competition behind. He fired back one half-litre mug, then two more in quick succession. When no one else could finish a third mug, he was proclaimed the winner. Moments later, he collapsed and died from alcohol poisoning. Five other contestants, four men and a woman, were rushed to hospital to have their stomachs pumped.
Abroad, the story was quite a novelty, meriting a spot in the Yahoo! Internet site's "Oddly Enough" news category, but it raised few eyebrows here, where an estimated 40,000 Russians drink themselves to death each year.
"Drinking in Russia is of a special character -- no public or family event can be celebrated or marked without it," says Mr. Shapkin, the lobbyist. "Russians begin drinking with the birth of a baby and finish with drinks at the after-funeral party, and often the reason for the gathering is forgotten after a certain number of bottles are opened.
"It's like Russians feel they are teenagers, challenging the adult world. And this society is very loyal to its alcoholics. People feel sympathy for drunkards."
Shortly before the fatal drinking contest, Russia's ORT television channel convened a roundtable discussion on what to do about the epidemic of alcoholism. "We meet on the eve of the holiday, and are sober so far," began host Svetlana Sorokina, a popular TV personality. She then read out a letter from a viewer in the northern province of Karelia: "Save us from the drinking ocean, where our fathers, husbands, brothers and children drown."
The panelists then attacked drinking and listed the damage the bottle has done to Russian society: untold harm to its economic development due to lost productivity, as well as some gruesome social indicators. For example, the life expectancy of Russian men is now just 58 years, a full 12 shy of the figure for women.
"That's a wartime statistic," says Irina Skorohodova, vice-governor of Yaroslavl region, northeast of Moscow, and alcohol-related illnesses are believed to be at least half to blame.
Other guests complained that the state would never do anything to take on the alcohol industry because liquor taxes account for a large chunk of its budget. Only one participant tried to mount a defence of drink, at least for his own gender.
"One can live without vodka, but it's boring. It's just the way God created men. It's not good for women, so they shouldn't drink," said Igor Svinarenko, editor in chief of the popular men's magazine, Medved.
"Vodka replaces everything for Russian men -- money, good roads, good housing, prestigious work, an interesting life. After a glass or two, all the problems disappear and the life seems good enough."
Drinking in Russia has a special history, one intertwined with that of the people.
In the 10th century, Prince Vladimir (later made a saint) is said to have chosen Christianity over Islam because the latter prohibited alcohol and "drinking is the joy of the Rus." And yet, in one legendary 14th-century battle, the Russian army was caught hung-over by the Mongols and slaughtered on the banks of the River Pyani. Even today, the word "pyani" means drunk.
Peter the Great, himself a well-known lush, is said to have tormented those who came late to his parties by making them drink bowls of vodka, and then endure the aftereffects for the enjoyment of those who had arrived on time. During the Second World War, dictator Joseph Stalin issued soldiers at the front a ration of 100 grammes per day to fortify them for battle.
The two leaders who tried to crack down on the sale of alcohol, Tsar Nicholas II and Mikhail Gorbachev, both failed and were forced from their posts a short time later.
"If you don't drink, you look suspicious," says Alexander Danilin, a Moscow expert in drug and alcohol abuse.
Back on the train to Petushki, everyone agrees with that statement. They say drinking is simply a part of Russian life, especially in small, provincial towns.
"Russian people drink because life's hard. It's a different mentality than in other countries," 20-year-old Ilya Mikhailin says. "Maybe in smaller countries people take care of each other better. But Russia is huge."
The youths on the train laugh at the idea that a Gorbachev-style prohibition would ever succeed. "If they reduce the sale of vodka, our grannies will immediately start brewing," says Mr. Gurkin, the 19-year-old engineering student.
He says that only an economic upturn in Russia would get people to cut back on the vodka. "If life was better, I think, people would drink less," he says, but then quickly changes his mind. "No, maybe more."
Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail's Moscow correspondent.
The most recent statistics I've seen show U.S. consumption of all forms of ethanol at around 9.2 liters. What that is in litres I can't say, but I think it's close.
I was in the Soviet Union in 1988, and boy was that statement true! At dinner they kept filling up the shot glasses, and kept checking to make sure we drank them. I finally resorted to furtively pouring mine into the floral centerpiece.
Then when Gorby cut back on the availability of vodka, the "grannies" started making their own. That's when Gorby started rationing sugar, which put Castro in a heap of hurt.
Consumption of pure alcohol in the world in litres of pure alcohol by inhabitant and year in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 :
| WORLD ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION TOTAL ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION BY COUNTRY (1996 - 1999) (Ranked in order of per capita consumption in 1999) Liters of pure alcohol
|
||||||
| Rank | Country | Reliability | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 |
| 1 | Luxemburg | ** | 11,6 | 11,4 | 13,3 | 12,2 |
| 2 | Republic of Ireland | *** | 9,9 | 10,5 | 11,0 | 11,6 |
| 3 | Portugal | ** | 11,6 | 11,3 | 11,3 | 11,0 |
| 4 | France | ** | 11,2 | 10,9 | 10,8 | 10,7 |
| 5 | Germany | *** | 10,6 | 10,8 | 10,6 | 10,6 |
| 6 | Czech Republic | ** | 10,3 | 10,5 | 10,5 | 10,5 |
| 7 | Rumania | * | 9,6 | 9,8 | 10,5 | 10,3 |
| 8 | Spain | ** | 9,3 | 10,2 | 10,1 | 9,9 |
| 9 | Hungary | ** | 10,3 | 10,1 | 10,2 | 9,7 |
| 10 | Denmark | *** | 10,0 | 9,9 | 9,5 | 9,5 |
| 11 | Austria | ** | 9,7 | 9,5 | 9,3 | 9,3 |
| 12 | Switzerland | *** | 9,3 | 9,2 | 9,2 | 9,2 |
| 13 | Greece | * | 8,7 | 8,8 | 8,6 | 8,9 |
| 14 | Russia | * | 7,3 | 7,3 | 7,9 | 8,6 |
| 15 | Slovak Republic | ** | 8,3 | 8,3 | 8,0 | 8,2 |
| 16 | Belgium | ** | 9,1 | 9,1 | 8,2 | 8,2 |
| 17 | Netherlands | *** | 8,1 | 8,2 | 8,1 | 8,2 |
| 18 | United Kingdom | *** | 7,9 | 8,1 | 7,9 | 8,1 |
| 19 | Latvia | ** | 6,8 | 6,9 | 7,1 | 7,7 |
| 20 | Italy | *** | 8,0 | 8,0 | 7,8 | 7,7 |
| 21 | Australia | ** | 7,5 | 7,5 | 7,6 | 7,5 |
| 22 | New Zealand | *** | 7,8 | 7,3 | 7,6 | 7,4 |
| 23 | Finland | *** | 6,7 | 7,0 | 7,1 | 7,3 |
| 24 | Cyprus | *** | 6,6 | 6,6 | 7,0 | 7,0 |
| 25 | Poland | * | 6,3 | 6,7 | 6,7 | 6,9 |
| 26 | USA | *** | 6,6 | 6,6 | 6,6 | 6,7 |
| 27 | Japan | ** | 6,7 | 6,4 | 6,5 | 6,6 |
| 28 | Bulgaria | * | 7,8 | 7,0 | 6,8 | 6,6 |
| 29 | Argentina | * | 6,7 | 6,9 | 6,8 | 6,4 |
| 30 | Canada | *** | 6,2 | 6,1 | 6,2 | 6,3 |
| 31 | Uruguay | ** | 5,9 | 5,9 | 6,0 | 6,0 |
| 32 | Malta | *** | 5,3 | 5,1 | 5,1 | 5,2 |
| 33 | South Africa | * | 4,9 | 4,8 | 4,9 | 5,0 |
| 34 | Venezuela | * | 5,5 | 5,2 | 5,2 | 4,9 |
| 35 | Sweden | ** | 4,9 | 5,1 | 4,9 | 4,9 |
| 36 | Chile | ** | 5,0 | 4,5 | 5,1 | 4,9 |
| 37 | Colombia | * | 4,5 | 4,3 | 4,4 | 4,5 |
| 38 | Norway | ** | 4,1 | 4,4 | 4,3 | 4,4 |
| 39 | Brazil | ** | 4,1 | 4,1 | 4,0 | 4,2 |
| 40 | Iceland | ** | 3,7 | 3,9 | 4,3 | 4,0 |
| 41 | Thailand | *** | 4,5 | 4,4 | 4,3 | 3,9 |
| 42 | China | * | 3,7 | 3,7 | 3,7 | 3,8 |
| 43 | Mexico | * | 3,4 | 3,1 | 3,2 | 3,2 |
| 44 | Taiwan | * | 2,7 | 2,8 | 3,0 | 3,0 |
| 45 | Guyana | ** | 2,9 | 2,9 | 2,7 | 2,8 |
| 46 | Estonia | ** | 2,3 | 2,4 | 2,4 | 2,5 |
| 47 | Paraguay | * | 2,1 | 2,3 | 2,3 | 2,3 |
| 48 | Cuba | * | 2,7 | 2,7 | 2,3 | 2,2 |
| 49 | Singapore | ** | 1,6 | 1,7 | 1,7 | 1,7 |
| 50 | Peru | * | 1,7 | 1,6 | 1,4 | 1,4 |
| Average | 6,6 | 6,6 | 6,7 | 6,7 | ||
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