Vodka Politics

Even today, the average teenage Russian boy has a worse chance of living to age sixty-five than do boys in failed states like Somalia and Ethiopia.5 But unlike these desperate places, it isn’t malnourishment or famine that is to blame—nor is it the errant bullets of civil war: it is vodka, pure and simple

In announcing his anti-alcohol campaign in 2009, then-president Dmitry Medvedev bemoaned that, on average, Russians drank a “mind-boggling” eighteen liters of pure alcohol per year, roughly twice that of the United States and about ten liters more than what the World Health Organization considers healthy.

Indeed, for at least the past five hundred years the enduring strength of the Russian state itself cannot be understood without reference to alcohol.