Gorbachev's Sobering Challenge
How an attempt to reduce alcoholism had the opposite effect, while also tanking an economy.
2 min read · from UNINTENDED by Mayank Mehta
When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Union in 1985, the country was drinking itself to death. Alcoholism wasn't just a public health problem. It was a national emergency. Male life expectancy was declining. Workplace accidents were rampant. Domestic violence, child abuse, and absenteeism were all closely linked to the country's staggering consumption of vodka. The Soviet state earned billions of rubles from alcohol taxes, but the social cost was becoming impossible to ignore.
Gorbachev, a man who preferred mineral water to vodka, decided to act. He launched an anti-alcohol campaign of unprecedented scope. Alcohol sales were restricted to a few hours per day. Distilleries were shut down. Vineyards in wine-producing regions were destroyed. Official receptions became dry. The legal drinking age was raised. Gorbachev, once addressed as General Secretary, became known in popular jokes as the Secretary of Mineral Water.
For a brief moment, the campaign appeared to work. Alcohol consumption dropped. Male life expectancy ticked upward for the first time in years. Hospitals reported fewer alcohol-related admissions.
Then the Soviet population adapted.
Homemade moonshine production exploded. Citizens brewed samogon in bathtubs, basements, and garden sheds using sugar, grain, and whatever else they could ferment. The quality was terrible. The alcohol content was unpredictable. Poisoning cases surged as people drank industrial solvents, cologne, and cleaning fluids as substitutes. Organized crime moved in to fill the gap, establishing distribution networks for illegal alcohol that would later form the infrastructure for the Russian mafia.
Meanwhile, the state budget cratered. Alcohol taxes had been one of the government's largest revenue sources, and the campaign had eliminated them almost overnight. Facing a fiscal crisis, the government turned to the printing press. More rubles were printed, which fueled inflation, which destabilized the economy further. The campaign, designed to heal Soviet society, was now contributing to its economic collapse.
By 1988, the campaign was quietly abandoned. Alcohol consumption returned to its previous levels almost immediately. The moonshine infrastructure remained. The organized crime networks remained. The fiscal damage remained. Gorbachev had tried to change a deeply embedded cultural behavior through top-down prohibition, and the system had fought back with the full arsenal of human ingenuity, stubbornness, and thirst.