Vodka Politics (67 page)

Yet when viewed through the lens of vodka politics, the pattern of demodernization could not be more clear. Returning to the two-dimensional, health-and-wealth diagrams of Åslund’s Swedish compatriot Hans Rosling, we can quickly identify distinct patterns of post-communist transitions from 1980 to 2000 (
figure 20.3
). Poland and the Czech Republic represent the primarily beer- and wine-drinking Visegrad countries of Eastern Europe, which paused only briefly before continuing toward the healthy-wealthy corner. Other countries from the war-ridden Caucasus to the economically isolated and unreformed autocracies of Central Asia suffered economic contraction but little corresponding deterioration in health—due partly to the lack of a strong vodka-drinking culture in those states. The only countries that show a similar “demodernization” trajectory toward the lower left are Russia and Ukraine (shown), as well as Moldova, Belarus, and the Baltics.

Figure 20.3
P
OST
-C
OMMUNIST
“T
RANSITIONS
” C
OMPARED
, 1980–2000. Sources: Life expectancy figures derived from the Human Mortality Database,
mortality.org
. For notes on Gapminder data collection and standardization of GDP per capita statistics see
http://www.gapminder.org/documentation/documentation/gapdoc001_v9.pdf
. For income per person for Poland, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine see Angus Maddison, “Historical Statistics for the World Economy: 1–2006 AD” (2008),
www.ggdc.net/maddison/
. For income per person for the Czech Republic see Maddison (2008) supplemented by UNSTAT II (2008 adjusted),
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp
.

What explains this demodernization? First, these are all countries with a well-entrenched vodka-drinking culture, cultivated through years of subservience not only within the Soviet empire but also the Russian empire that preceded it—both of which encouraged vodka consumption as the cornerstone of autocratic statecraft.
⁵⁹
Second, with the exception of the Baltic states, the economic reforms in these “demoderinizing” countries were similarly haphazard and halting. As a consequence, when researchers investigated barter transactions and the Russian-style “virtual economy” of the 1990s, they found the practice most prevalent in the same region: from Moldova and Ukraine to Russia, Belarus, and (to a lesser extent) the Baltics.
⁶⁰
Since the Baltic states made a cleaner break with the economics and the politics of the past in their effort to gain entry to the European Union, the duration of their demodernization was dramatically shorter than their similarly heavy-drinking neighbors to the south and east.

Åslund’s explanation for the social demodernization is based on unseen ethnic traits: “East Slavic and Baltic men are company men who found it exceedingly hard to adapt to the transition and instead fell for the temptation of heavy drinking, causing many to die young.”
⁶¹
This misses the point—it is not ethnicity or genetics at work; it is a complex, centuries-old historical legacy of vodka-politics statecraft, which has been embedded into cultural and economic patterns.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 it left some twenty-five million ethnic Russians—many of whom had lived their entire lives in cosmopolitan cities like Odessa, Baku, or Almaty—beached in the so-called “near abroad”—the other newly independent post-Soviet republics. Some chose to “return” to a Russian homeland they had never visited and were often shocked at what they found. “They drink, as a norm,” marveled an ethnic Russian from Kyrgyzstan after settling in the Oryol region. “You can buy anything for a bottle, they don’t know any other price… here women living on their own, when they ask for help with the cattle or the allotment, they must have a bottle, nobody ever takes money… so you learn to make
samogon
.”
⁶²

Jarring experiences like this—even between members of the same ethnic group—suggest that ethnicity is not what causes social demodernization, but vodka: not just how much people drink, but the ways in which it has been entrenched into both people’s accepted day-to-day coping strategies and the economic life of the country itself.

In simplest terms: economic crisis plus vodka politics equals demodernization.

Demodernizing Values

Russia’s vodka-fueled demodernization also impacted its political prospects. Just as Hans Rosling has mapped the movement of nations toward the healthy-wealthy corner over the past two centuries, political sociologists have charted a similar evolution of cultural traits supportive of democracy and effective governance. For them, “modernization” is in the triumph of rationalism over tradition, secularism over religion, tolerance over xenophobia, gender equality over patriarchy, and liberalism, happiness, life satisfaction, individualism, and self-expression over basic survival needs. The relationship between economic modernization and the cultural changes that support democracy has proven quite robust, since it is not the elites, but the orientations of the citizenry that motivate them to push for liberty and effective governance. “Genuine democracy is not simply a machine that, once set up, will function effectively by itself,” concludes University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart. “It depends on the people.”
⁶³

Yet his own work, which tracks the global progress of such values, bodes poorly for Russia in the 1990s. Based on his exhaustive World Values Survey—conducted regularly by a network of social scientists in over eighty countries—Inglehart scores each country in terms of simple survival values versus modern self-expression values and traditional values versus modern secular/rational ones. Happily, from the 1980s through the 1990s every country surveyed improved on at least one of these dimensions, and most improved on both… except two. Russia and Belarus slid backwards: instead of becoming more secular and modern, they were becoming more religious and more traditional than under the Soviets. Russians were also becoming more suspicious, insular, distrustful, and dissatisfied: over half of Russian respondents said they were “not happy” or “not happy at all,” placing Russia among the world’s most miserable populations, while their trust in public institutions ranked as the world’s lowest. Findings like these suggest that the economic and health catastrophes of “transition” were accompanied by a cultural demodernization.
⁶⁴

For development sociologists, the conclusion is clear. Inglehart claims that “support for democracy is relatively weak in Russia—indeed, it is weaker than in almost any other country.” In some ways this is understandable, since the tumultuous 1990s led many to associate democracy with drunkenness, disorder, and economic insecurity.
⁶⁵
This societal weakening of pro-democratic values was just another impediment to meaningful political reform demanding more effective governance.

Demodernization, then, is a complex phenomenon encompassing political, economic, social, and cultural attributes—and vodka seems central to
understanding it all. Post-communist transition, when mixed with the legacies of vodka politics, produced the thoroughly unprecedented demodernization of a global superpower. In turn, the economic, political, and even cultural consequences of this demodernization have bolstered the durability of Russian autocracy, making democratization far more difficult.

Certainly this was anything but an ordinary economic downturn.

21

The Russian Cross

The television news magazine
60 Minutes
has been a weekly staple for generations of American TV viewers. Since 1968 its poignant brand of investigative journalism has made it the longest-running, highest-rated, and most successful show in television history.

In early 1996—just as Boris Yeltsin began his miraculous political resurrection—a most remarkable
60 Minutes
investigation presented the true costs and human suffering of the post-Soviet “transition” to an otherwise disinterested American public. It painted an alarming picture: while Yeltsin battled to keep the communists from returning to power, “Russia,” it declared, “is confronting a humanitarian tragedy of immense proportions.”

Cut to CBS journalist Tom Fenton strolling through a snow-covered Moscow courtyard casually discussing Russia’s arduous transition to capitalism and democracy with an owlish man with a thick Brooklyn accent. While many Russia watchers were preoccupied with the economic side of demodernization—how many lost their jobs or how much production had contracted—this man was horrified by Russia’s deteriorating health statistics, which told of a wholesale social catastrophe that had accompanied Russia’s economic collapse. No one was better positioned to sound the alarm: Fenton’s interviewee was none other than Murray Feshbach—the same American demographer who had been publishing worrisome health statistics for decades. As we saw in
chapter 16
, it was Feshbach’s coauthored reports on infant mortality in the 1970s that suggested that the Soviet superpower was in dangerously frail health. And as we noted in
chapter 18
, it was Feshbach’s encyclopedic knowledge of the impairments to Russian health—alcohol foremost among them—that was consulted by journalists, academics, and policy makers alike. If his Cold War–era warnings were grim, his new reports about the collapse of Russian healthcare, its skyrocketing mortality, plummeting fertility, and shrinking, sickly population were downright apocalyptic.
¹

“Is there any parallel with this anywhere?” Fenton asks.

“No. Certainly not in any developed country.”

Like the Roman poet Virgil accompanying Dante Alighieri through the nine circles of hell in the
Divine Comedy
, Feshbach then guided the American journalist through the horrors of post-Soviet society: touring decrepit healthcare facilities, underfunded orphanages, polluted swimming holes, smog-filled cities, drug dens, vodka kiosks, and cigarette stores before winding up where Russians were arriving at an unprecedented rate: the cemetery. All the while, Feshbach spouted devastating statistics, explaining with his dark humor (no doubt a necessary defense against the depressing subject matter) how the decidedly unsexy issue of population health was quickly becoming a massive political challenge. “It puts in danger their economic and political reforms if everybody is dead. Of course, not
everybody
is dead, but their conditions are not very good,” Feshbach explained.
²

Skeptics have challenged such dire assessments: Were things really that bad? How could the nation’s health really impact the future of Russian politics? And what role did vodka play in this?
³

In 2006, academics Andrei Korotayev and Daria Khaltourina explained that the demographic crisis was generated by the “Russian cross.” They weren’t referring to the Russian Orthodox Church but rather to the dramatic upsurge in the Russian death rate in the 1990s just as the birth rate plummeted, statistics that formed the shape of a cross when plotted on a graph. With far more people dying than being born, the size of the Russian population has shrunken dramatically since the collapse of communism and will likely continue to do so.
⁴

Certainly, some argue, other countries also have higher death rates than birth rates—and not just Russia’s neighbors in post-Soviet demodernization. The “graying” of Western Europe also has produced more deaths than births and a gradual population decline. But as
figure 21.1
shows, when compared to wine-drinking Italy or the post-communist tribulations of the beer-swilling Czechs, the suddenness of the change combined with the sheer scale of lives lost makes the Russian cross categorically unlike anything seen before. According to Russia’s state statistical agency, in the twenty years from 1992 to 2012 some 12.5 million more Russians were buried than were born.
⁵
Outside of the horrors of total war, the only comparisons to such depopulation are the 1918 flu pandemic, China’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward, and the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
⁶
Yet since this devastation appears almost self-inflicted, Russia’s suffering has been passed over in relative silence.

Dead Drunk

What caused this horrific state of affairs? As it turns out, Khaltourina and Korotayev’s list of culprits is virtually identical to what Murray Feshbach explained to
60 Minutes
a decade earlier, beginning with a disaster in healthcare. Amid the worst of the crisis in the mid-1990s, Feshbach took the American viewing audience into a typical Russian hospital, which was struggling just to operate as ever more government resources were siphoned off to pay for the war in Chechnya. Proceeding across crumbling floorboards down a dimly lit hallway, viewers saw discarded plastic water bottles reused as drip containers, rubber sheeting used as a mattress, a neonatal unit with only one respirator, and vital drugs in such short supply that patients are told to buy their own.