How Putin's Long War Is Destroying the Fabric of Russian Society
As we have chronicled unendingly, Russia is dying. Putin is hastening the end.
by Melissa Lawford
December 5, 2024
When Timothy Ash travelled around the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, he met young veterans who had returned from the war in Afghanistan. They were psychologically broken – and drunk.
“They were pretty effed-up, a lot of them,” says Ash, now Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford.
One night in Volgograd, in southern Russia, Ash met a man in his mid-20s who had fought in Afghanistan. “He got absolutely blasted, drunk as hell. Something was not right with the kid. He ended up getting attacked by a group of youths because he’d gotten so drunk. He got beaten to pulp. I had to drag him out.”
Russia has a long history with alcoholism. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, drinking was in decline.
Now, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, official figures show alcohol addiction is surging again for the first time in a decade.
Vodka sales this year surged to a record high and policymakers are scrambling to halt a rise in alcohol-related deaths.
Georgy Filimonov, the firebrand governor of Vologda, a region north of Moscow, has just passed laws restricting alcohol sales to two hours a day on weekdays, which will come into effect in March, after 7,500 people in his region died because of drinking in the last year.
“This is cirrhosis of the liver, pancreatitis, cardiomyopathy, stabbings, shootings, drunk driving,” Filimonov told Russian newspaper Kommersant in October. “This year (2024), according to official statistics alone, the incidence of alcoholism has increased by 30pc. 71pc of deaths among our able-bodied citizens are related to alcohol.”
Filimonov will not say why.
“Something is going wrong,” says Ash. “You had a period where you saw declining alcoholism in Russia. Now they are going the other way.”
What has changed is the war. It is becoming increasingly clear that the fabric of Russian society is falling apart.
As in the 1980s, Russian soldiers are returning from the frontline wounded and traumatized. Thousands more are dying, leaving grieving families at home.
But what is happening today is on a completely different scale. Around 15,000 Soviet soldiers died in Afghanistan. The Russian death toll in Ukraine is at least ten or more times that already.
Between Feb 24 2022 and Nov 19 this year, there have been at least 120,000 Russian military deaths in the war in Ukraine, according to analysis of probate records by Mediazona, a site that works in collaboration with BBC’s Russian service.
As many as 728,000 more have been injured, according to analysis by The Economist, based on leaked documents from America’s defense department.
Vast numbers of them have turned to vodka to drown their pain and trauma.
“Russia will have to come to terms with this. A whole generation of youth has been lost in Ukraine,” says Ash.
These men are not spread equally across the country. Mobilization has been heavily weighted to rural areas in the south and east. These are the places where alcohol consumption has been rising fastest, according to an analysis by Olha Zadorozhna, assistant professor of economics at Kozminski University.
The steepest jumps of all of Russia’s 86 regions were in Ingushetia and Karachay-Cherkessia. In these two regions on Russia’s southern border with Europe, the consumption of vodka and brandy surged by 25pc in 2022, according to Zadorozhna’s analysis.
Rising alcohol consumption is also heavily concentrated in rural areas that have particularly low incomes, she says.
Nationally, during the first 10 months of 2024. vodka sales hit their highest level since records began , according to alcohol regulator Rosalkogoltobakkontrol (RATK). Total alcohol sales rose to a seven-year high of 1.84bn litres.
Filimonov’s regional campaign has sparked weeks of intense discussion across Russian media and Telegram channels. At face value, Filimonov’s campaign against heavy drinking seems in stark contrast to the Russian government’s typical approach.
“Historically, during the USSR, Russia used alcohol to control the population,” says Zadorozhna. “In the 1960s, actually people spent twice as much on alcohol as on meat. When you drink a lot, your memory deteriorates, it affects your long-term planning. People just don’t think about the future that much.”
When President Vladimir Putin met with mothers of deceased soldiers in 2022, he told them it was better that their sons died fighting in Ukraine than if they had died from drinking at home. “It is kind of part of the strategy to make people go and fight,” says Zadorozhna.
She is skeptical of Filimonov’s motives. Drinking is still everywhere in pop culture in Russia and it is cheap. A liter of vodka costs just $1.80. Banning alcohol sales during certain hours does not stop people from buying alcohol, but it will make them feel more ashamed about it, says Zadorozhna.
“There is a psychological effect, people feel guilty for consuming alcohol. People who have these feelings of discontent and guilt may be easily manipulated. Definitely alcohol is a way to control the population.”
Filimonov insists he has a different reason – one that also tells a story about the toll of the war in a different way. He wants to tackle Russia’s shrinking population.
Russia’s birth rate hit a 25-year low in the first six months of this year – a statistic that the Kremlin’s press secretary said was “catastrophic for the future of the nation”.
It is a demographic crisis that will only get worse as the war casualties continue to mount.
Curbing alcohol sales will not only mean fewer deaths but more births, Filimonov argues. He has pointed to Chechnya, where alcohol sales are restricted and the birth rate is the highest in Russia.
He told Kommersant that his measures mean the birth rate in Vologda will rise “by 1.5 to 2 times” in five years.
Yet whatever policymakers’ motives for restricting alcohol sales, they are not addressing the root cause: the war in Ukraine.
“It is going to be a scar on Russian society for an awfully long time,” says Ash. “And they’re unlikely to win an actual decisive victory. If you suffer war losses and you fail to win, it’s like Vietnam or Iraq war veterans. People ask, ‘Why the hell did we do that?’”
— This essay originally appeared at ToThePointNews.com.
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And here we have Fentanyl; raw materials provided by the PRC/CCP and made available in the U.S. thanks to the Biden-Harris Junta's open - that is OPEN - borders policy.
And then there is, e.g., widespread myocarditis and "turbo cancers" thanks to the Covid "vaccines."
Can't prove it, but can't shake the thought that this is all part of a coordinated effort at decimating resistance and/or depopulation.
The spirit inside a man is never really satisfied until one is reconciled back to God. The atheistic worldview continues to fall short in nations and individuals that claim humanistic worldviews as sufficient. Psalms 22-23. John 3. 1 John 1:9. 1 Corinthians 1-5.