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 baby food and fresh fruits and vegetables.
A high percentage of alcoholics are also prone to committing criminal offenses while under the influence of alcohol. According to Segal, 70 percent of the alcoholics he studied in the 1960s had committed crimes. The chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, Smirnov, gave Segal a more detailed picture: 79.9 percent of the robberies, 69.3 percent of the armed assaults, and 55.8 percent of the thefts are committed by persons in a state of intoxication. Other Soviet sources report that alcohol is involved in 75 percent of the murders and rapes and 90 to 95 percent of the assaults.
The Soviet economy is being drained by widespread drunkenness. In a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1985 quoted by Segal, a group of Soviet
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