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Drunk in the USSR
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17491 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1990 |
2,207 Words |
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Stanislav Levchenko
Stanislav Levchenko is a J.M. Olin Fellow of Boston
University's College of Communications. He is the author of
On the Wrong Side and other books and is a member of the
Jamestown Foundation, which helps defectors from communist
countries resettle in the West. |
THE DRUNKEN SOCIETY
Boris M. Segal
New York: Hippocrene Books, 1990
618 pp., $40
Many years ago, when I was still a Soviet citizen and lived in Moscow, I saw the same thing every morning. In the courtyard of my apartment house, half a dozen individuals would be sitting on a bench. They were quiet and unshaven, in dirty clothes, with glassy eyes, and their hands shaking. Their occasional speech would come out slurred. These people were desperate alcoholics who lived in my apartment house. Each morning they were impatiently waiting for the local liquor store to open. On other occasions they would go to the local pharmacy and buy cough syrup or some other medication containing alcohol and consume it by the bottle to cure their hangovers.
From my childhood, I felt that alcoholism was widespread in the Soviet Union, and as I got older it seemed to me that the number of alcoholics was increasing. This disease was typical not only of lower-class people. The intelligentsia and even some of the Soviet leaders were not immune, as I saw for myself. For decades, it was very difficult, if not impossible, however, to obtain truthful statistics on vices in the Soviet Union. According to pre-Gorbachev propaganda, drunkenness, drug addiction, prostitution, and corruption were typical only of decaying and decadent capitalism. Such ugly things simply did not exist in puritanical socialist societies.
In reality, drunkenness and alcoholism are so widespread in the USSR that some Soviet academics are
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