Stalinism and alcoholism in the Soviet Union (6)

How serious was the alcohol problem?

In the first instalment of this series, drawing on Chernyaev’s diary, we recounted how Gorbachev described the alcohol problem at the Politburo meeting of 4 April 1985. According to Gorbachev, alcohol consumption was not merely a major social and economic problem; by then, it had also become a danger threatening “the biological state of the people” and “the genetic future”. Unless this problem was resolved, communism could not even be contemplated, he added. [*]

“Passage to the other world”, 1988. A Soviet anti-alcohol propaganda poster portraying alcoholism as a road leading to death.

Expressions such as “the biological state of the people” and “the genetic future” showed how dramatically Gorbachev presented the issue to the Politburo. It should also be remembered that these words were spoken in an environment in which the alcohol problem extended right up to the summit of the party and state apparatus. Yet it would be wrong to regard Gorbachev’s observation merely as an exaggerated turn of phrase intended to persuade the members of the Politburo. By the mid-1980s, the alcohol problem had become a systemic pathology in Soviet society: one that directly threatened the country’s demographic future and had grave consequences for health, working life, family relations, crime rates, public finances, and the economy as a whole.

In his memoirs, Gorbachev writes that strong social pressure was mounting on party and state institutions, as letters - most often written by wives and mothers - came flooding in. These letters gave alarming examples of family tragedies, workplace accidents, and crimes caused by drunkenness. At the same time, according to Gorbachev, writers and doctors were also voicing their complaints on the subject in the strongest possible terms. [**] Ligachev, too, paints a similar picture in his memoirs, though in a more dramatic and rhetorical style. According to his account, by the early 1980s the number of letters sent to the Central Committee, the government, and the editorial boards of newspapers and journals had risen markedly. Most came from women in anguish, saying that drunkenness had taken the lives of their sons and husbands, or left their children disabled. Ligachev remarks that the saying “the tears shed by women and children are as plentiful as the vodka drunk by men” was apt, and describes this as a genuine cry for help. He adds that scientists, too, were sounding the alarm and warning of the danger of the nation’s genetic stock being degraded. [***]

A symbolic action held under official supervision during the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign: a woman demonstrator sets fire to a mock-up of a bottle of Russkaya vodka.

Although there were far from negligible differences between them in terms of the sources used, the methods of data collection and calculation, and the statistical results obtained, studies by independent researchers show that alcohol consumption in the Soviet Union rose very rapidly from the 1950s onwards. [****] In terms of spirits consumption, the Soviet Union ranked first in the world. The average age of people with alcohol dependence had fallen, while alcohol use and alcoholism among women had risen sharply. Alcohol consumption significantly increased workplace accidents, absenteeism, and violent crime. It was also regarded as one of the principal causes of the decline in average life expectancy and the rise in infant mortality. In the Slavic republics - the epicentre of the alcohol problem - it was also seen as one of the main factors behind the increase in divorce rates.

The period from 1968 to 1984 was one of stagnation - and in some respects even regression - in terms of life expectancy and public health. During these years of stagnation, mortality among adult men rose slowly but steadily; among adult women, it either increased or remained unchanged. The same period was also characterised by an unabated rise in alcohol consumption. One of the regime’s responses was not to discuss the scale of the problem openly, but to classify statistics on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related deaths.

The concealment of statistics on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related deaths in the Soviet Union not only prevented the public from learning the true scale of the problem; it also crippled scientific research in this field. In Nemtsov’s words, this long period of secrecy regarding the alcohol situation, together with the total ban on epidemiological studies of alcohol-related problems, effectively wiped out Russian “alcohology” - the field of research devoted to the study of alcohol consumption and its consequences. [*****] Under these conditions, a number of researchers and scientists carried out independent or semi-independent studies seeking to determine the scale of alcohol production and consumption in the Soviet Union, as well as the problems caused by heavy drinking. [******]

One of the most important conclusions to be drawn from these independent or semi-independent studies is that it would be misleading to try to grasp and convey the scale of the problem through a single measure. The problem needs to be examined at least on four different levels: actual alcohol consumption, both official and illicit; the number of registered and unregistered people with alcohol dependence; the socio-economic damage caused by alcohol; and its consequences for health and demography. For this reason, measuring the scale of the problem solely by the volume of consumption would be deceptive. For example, in the Slavic core regions of the Soviet Union, the pattern of drinking was largely vodka-based; binge drinking, involving the rapid intake of large quantities of alcohol, made accidents, violence, and sudden deaths more likely. The quality of alcoholic beverages was another factor that had to be taken into account.

The picture that emerges from these studies is striking. We now know that between 1960 and 1979 official alcohol sales in the Soviet Union almost quadrupled. [*******] By 1984, the officially recorded amount of pure alcohol sold through state channels had reached 10.5 litres per person per year. It is worth noting, incidentally, that many writers on Soviet history have often been content simply to cite this official figure. Yet this figure did not include the illicit alcoholic drinks produced at home, known as samogon. According to calculations led by the Duke University economist Vladimir Treml - and later corroborated by Soviet statisticians - samogon production added an unrecorded volume equivalent to at least 30 per cent of registered sales. In 1984, actual total consumption in the Soviet Union had reached 14.2 litres of pure alcohol per person per year. In the Russian SFSR and the Baltic republics, this level was considerably higher than the all-Union average.

Note: The values in the three consumption columns are given in litres of pure alcohol per person per year. The unregistered share indicates the estimated proportion of samogon in total consumption. Source: Vladimir M. Shkolnikov and Aleksandr Nemtsov, “The Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Variations in Russian Mortality”, in Premature Death in the New Independent States, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1997, p. 243.

As we conclude this instalment, let us dwell a little further on the demographic decline caused by alcoholism, which we briefly noted above. From the mid-1960s onwards, the Soviet Union began to be shaken by a demographic crisis rarely seen in the history of modern industrialised countries. The sharp decline in mortality rates during the post-war period went into reverse in 1964. The crude death rate in the country, which stood at 6.9 per 1,000 people in 1964, had risen to 10.3 by 1981 and to 10.8 by 1984.

The heaviest toll of this demographic crisis was borne by the working-age male population. Soviet men’s life expectancy at birth, which stood at 64.3 years in 1965, had fallen to around 62 years by the early 1980s. By contrast, women’s life expectancy remained stable at 73-74 years, widening the sex gap in life expectancy to as much as 11.5 years. This asymmetry between men and women was one of the largest recorded in the developed world at the time. Research led by Christopher Davis and Murray Feshbach showed that between 1970 and 1975 mortality among Soviet citizens in their forties increased by 30 per cent, while among those in their fifties it rose by 20 per cent. [********] Alcoholism was one of the major factors behind this increase, through its role in coronary heart disease, stroke, acute circulatory failure, accidents, poisonings, and violence.

Source: “Notes on ‘Some Causes of Rising Mortality in the USSR’”, CIA, accessed 25 May 2026.

Although there were far from negligible differences between these studies in scope, data sources, methods of calculation and, above all, the results they reached, the general picture emerging from independent research clearly pointed in the same direction: by the mid-1980s, it was no longer possible to regard the alcohol problem in the Soviet Union as an isolated “bad habit” or as a health issue in the narrow sense. What was involved was a large-scale crisis and a pattern of social decay affecting the entire fabric of society, with destructive consequences for health, family life, the production process and the demographic structure.

[*] Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev (1985), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, p. 39.

[**] Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, New York: Doubleday, 1996, p. 221.

[***] Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev, trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, Michele A. Berdy, Dobrochna Dyrcz-Freeman and Marian Schwartz, New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 335–336.

[****] “The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia’s Mortality Crisis”, PMC / NIH, accessed 25 May 2026.

[*****] Aleksandr Nemtsov, A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia, trans. Howard M. Goldfinger and Andrew Stickley, Södertörn University, 2011, p. 49.

[******] Notable among those who carried out independent work in this field were Vladimir Treml, Aleksandr Nemtsov, Boris Segal and A. Krasikov - the pen name of Mikhail Baitalsky. Of course, the CIA’s studies in this area cannot be placed on the same footing as independent academic research; nevertheless, it should be noted that CIA specialists also sought to produce alternative estimates in areas where official Soviet statistics were unreliable or incomplete, and carried out similar research for this purpose.

[*******] “The Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Variations in Russian Mortality”, NCBI / NIH, accessed 25 May 2026.

[********] “Health Crisis in the USSR”, International Journal of Epidemiology - Oxford Academic, accessed 25 May 2026.

To be continued