Russians Still Drinking Nine Liters of Registered Alcohol and Six More of Illegal Alcohol Every Year, HSE Scholars Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 4 – Over the past decade, the Russian government has carried out a concerted policy to get Russians to drink less, raising prices and restricting the times and places alcohol can be sold; and it has had some success in pushing down the amount of legally produced alcohol consumed.

            But Russians, sometimes as substitutes and sometimes as supplements, continue to consume enormous quantities of illegally produced alcohol, a category that includes both that produced off the books by legal distilleries and that produced by unregistered and hence illegal individuals and groups known as samogon (“moonshine”).

            In addition, Russians continue to drink surrogates like perfumes or cleaners that contain alcohol, something that pushes total alcohol consumption per capita up even further and puts people at even greater health risk because such products never intended for consumption contain dangerous poisons.

            These are by definition not counted by the authorities, something that has allowed Moscow to claim victories in its campaign, even though the current level of consumption of nine liters of officially registered alcohol per capita per year is one that WHO officials say not only compromises health but risks genetic damage.

            However, there are indirect methods to compute how much “illegal” alcohol Russians are consuming, and these measures show that for the country as a whole, they drink six liters of pure alcohol from these other sources, bringing the Russian total to 15 liters, vastly higher than in other countries and a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of people there.

            And what is especially disturbing is that in some regions, those that are not traditionally Muslim in the first instance, alcohol consumption is much higher, with per capital rates of both legal and illegal alcohol being far higher than that figure, although the exact rate is impossible to compute because it is not clear whether one is a substitute for or an addition to the other.

            That Russians continue to drink far more than the government says and that they turn to illegal alcohol especially when the legal variety becomes more expensive or difficult to acquire is widely known but seldom documented. Now, documentation has been provided that shows just how terrible the situation with regard to alcohol consumption remains.

            In a new publication by two Higher School of Economics scholars, Lyudmila Zasimova and Marina Kolosnitsyna, the above figures are provided and justified in terms of the best official data available (“Exploring the Relationship Between Drinking Preferences and Recorded and Unrecorded Alcohol Consumption in Russian Regions, 2010-2016,” International Journal of Drug Policy, 82 (August 2020), summarized at iq.hse.ru/news/383077299.html).

            The two scholars used official reports for consumption patters of legal alcohol and then derived the totals for consumption of illegal alcohol by using a model developed by the Ministry of Health that relies on reports of medical problems related to alcohol reported to health care professionals in the regions. 

            The latter method is not perfect but any errors in such numbers likely understate the problem rather than overstate it because some doctors will not report an illness or death as being alcohol-related or because some who overconsume illegal alcohol may not get sick or may not seek assistance from the healthcare system.

            The figures given above are the average for Russia as a whole, but Zasimova and Kolosnitsyna say that consumption of legal alcohol ranges from 1.1 liters per capita per year in some regions, mostly predominantly Muslim, to as much as 17 to 20 liters per capita per year in some predominantly ethnic ones Russian ones.

            The high end of this range is far beyond the danger zone as defined by the WHO and other international health organizations, but it is likely that people in such places are among those who also consume illegal alcohol, something that makes their consumption significantly higher than anywhere else in the world.

            Indeed, the two say, the total consumption of alcohol in some regions is truly staggering in its dimensions. While some federal subjects consume little illegal alcohol, others show consumption rates of up to 21 liters of pure alcohol. Where people consume both rather than substituting one for the other, that could amount to 38 liters of pure alcohol per capita per year.  

            Even figures approaching that one are deadly and need to be kept in mind given the Putin regime’s constant suggestions that it has made “real progress” in the fight against alcoholism in Russian society.