Higher Incomes will Reduce Russians’ Reliance on Illegal Supplies of Vodka and Surrogates but Likely Won’t Reduce Deaths from Alcholism, Drobiz Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 10 – Relative to incomes, alcohol in Russia is one of the most expensive in the world; and consequently, Russians making less than 25,000 rubles (250 US dollars) a month turn to surrogates, Vadim Drobiz, head of the Center for Researching Federal and Regional Alcohol Markets, says.

            At present, he says, Russians buy in stores roughly 1.2 billion liters of hard alcohol each year but are estimated to consume 1.6 billion. The difference consists of either alcohol that is diverted from regular plants to avoid taxes, self-produced vodka or surrogates that can include dangerous chemicals (svpressa.ru/economy/article/422177/).

            Drobiz says that approximately ten million Russians are regular clients of these alternative forms of hard liquor, although that figure has declined slightly since Putin launched his expanded war in Ukraine in 2022 because the conflict has boosted the incomes of some of Russia’s poorest people and allowed them to stop purchasing alternatives to legal vodka.

            That experience has an important lesson: only rising incomes will reduce consumption of illegal alternatives to registered alcohol, especially because “no one in Russia is seriously fighting against” the production of the former and because Moscow isn’t making certain that low-cost alcohol will be available in stores.

            At the same time and despite media reporting to the contrary, Drobiz continues, most of the deaths from alcohol consumption involve overuse of legal vodka rather than the consumption of any amount of illegal alternatives. And that means that rising incomes won’t by themselves reduce the death rate from alcoholism in Russia.