Alcoholism has been a problem throughout the country's history because drinking is a pervasive, socially acceptable behaviour in Russian society.
Early history According to Russian legend, one of the main reasons that the 10th-century
Kievan prince
Vladimir the Great rejected
Islam is because of Islam's prohibition of drinking alcohol. He is purportedly quoted stating: In the 1540s,
Ivan the Terrible began setting up kabaks () or taverns in his major cities to help fill his coffers, and a third of Russian men were in debt to the kabaks by 1648.
20th century In 1909, the average alcohol consumption was said to be 11 bottles per capita per year. An estimated 4% of the population of St. Petersburg were alcoholics in 1913. At the beginning of
World War I, prohibition was introduced in the
Russian Empire, limiting the sale of hard liquor to restaurants. After the
Bolshevik Party came to power, they made repeated attempts to reduce consumption in the
Soviet Union. From the 1930s and 1940s until the mid-1980s, the primary treatment for alcoholism in Russia was
conditioned response therapy, but this has since fallen out of favour.
Leonid Brezhnev,
Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to impose a
partial prohibition campaign, which involved a massive anti-alcohol campaign, severe penalties against public drunkenness and alcohol consumption, and restrictions on sales of liquor. The campaign temporarily succeeded in reducing per capita alcohol consumption and improving quality-of-life measures such as life expectancies and crime rates, but it ultimately failed due to its deep unpopularity. A 1997 report published in the
Journal of Family Violence found that among men who killed their wives, 60–75% of offenders had been drinking before the incident. Lead researcher Professor David Zaridze estimated that the increase in alcohol consumption since 1987 has caused an additional three million deaths nationwide. After 2003, alcohol use in Russia began to drop as public opinion and government policy changed. For example, in 2007, Gennadi Onishenko, the country's chief public health official, voiced his concern over the nearly threefold rise in alcohol consumption over the past 16 years. Between 2003 and 2018, the number of deaths from all causes dropped by about 39% for men and 36% for women. Life expectancy also improved, reaching nearly 68 years for men and 78 years for women in 2018. In 2012, a national ban on sales of all types of alcoholic beverages from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. was introduced to complement regional bans. The Russian government has proposed reducing the state minimum vodka price in reaction to the
2014–15 Russian financial crisis. In December 2016, 78 people in
Irkutsk died in
a mass methanol poisoning. Medvedev reacted by calling for a ban on non-traditional alcoholic liquids like the bath lotion involved in this case, stating that "it's an outrage, and we need to put an end to this". In 2020 officials discussed raising the legal drinking age from 18 to 21. In October 2019, the World Health Organization announced that Russia is experiencing a decline in alcohol consumption among its citizens and a rapid increase in life expectancy as a result. Per capita consumption of pure ethanol, which was around 11–12 liters annually in the early 2000s—one of the highest rates globally—fell by 43% between 2006 and 2016. This reduction since 2003 has significantly contributed to lowering mortality rates, with deaths from all causes dropping by 39% for men and 36% for women between 2003 and 2018. According to the WHO report, male life expectancy increased from 57 years in the 1990s to 68 years, and female life expectancy reached 78 years, due to reduced alcohol consumption. Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova confirmed in 2018 that per capita alcohol consumption had decreased by 80%, while the number of people exercising regularly increased by over 40%, thanks to government policies combating alcohol addiction. ==Alcohol control==