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Drunk in the USSR
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17491 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
2,207 Words |
| Author
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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 concerned with the possibility of "erosion" of the genetic fund. Boris M. Segal, the author of The Drunken Society, has summarized all the data available on the subject. According to Segal, "Each new generation…is at higher risk of developing alcoholism, emotional problems, and antisocial behavior because of the neuropsychological deficit, developmental problems, and stresses caused by parental alcohol abuse." Segal reports that of Russian children surveyed, 40.4 percent were drinkers. Some even got drunk regularly.
Recently, I read an article in one of the popular Soviet magazines on alcoholism. I was shocked to find the publication claiming that every third child born in Moscow today is at least slightly retarded, and every sixth is suffering from either substantial retardation or a physical handicap. The reasons: alcoholic or drug addicted parents and malnutrition - the absence of quality
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