stronger beverages

Exactly thirty years ago, on May 7, 1985, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers adopted a resolution "On measures to overcome drunkenness and alcoholism"

In a series of great May anniversaries, one remained unnoticed - the anniversary of an event almost forgotten, but in all respects fateful. Exactly thirty years ago, on May 7, 1985, the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers adopted a resolution "On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism": apart from Gorbachev's appearance to the people in Leningrad and the promising but obscure decisions of the April plenum, this was the first evidence of change given to a simple Soviet person in sensations - and these sensations turned out to be painful. Like any collective psychotrauma, the campaign against drunkenness turned out to be ousted from cultural memory: none of the statesmen spoke about its thirtieth anniversary (only Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev admitted certain mistakes in an interview), they don’t make anniversary films about it on TV, it’s hard for oneself present a gala evening or concert on this occasion. And what a pity there would be for creative imagination: they say that reconstructions of battle scenes are now popular - you can imagine how impressive the reconstruction of the queue at the vodka department in 1985, as of 13.55 Moscow time, would have turned out. What about non-alcoholic weddings? And empty shelves with cheap cologne? And what about the magazine Sobriety and Culture with the first publication of Moscow-Petushkov? Everything was, but it was overgrown.
The anti-alcohol campaign is now perceived as a strange whim of the next general secretary - like the widespread planting of corn. The whole perestroika as a whole, I'm afraid, is perceived in exactly the same way. Meanwhile, if you delve into your memory, in addition to the queues for cologne, something else comes to mind: printouts of lectures by Academician Uglov with terrible alcohol statistics that went from hand to hand, articles by soil writers about how people drink too much, Rasputin’s “Fire” and Astafiev’s “Sad detective ”, the general feeling formulated by the director Govorukhin is that you can’t live like that (and drink like that). The anti-alcohol campaign (like the entire perestroika as a whole) was not an act of pure voluntarism: there was a real public demand for it - albeit not shared, as the queues at the vodka department show, by all sections of society. It was no longer possible to tie up - but the feeling that they had drunk to the brim was objectively present.
Thirty years have passed, and this feeling, like other details of the fight against drunkenness, has remained in the past: yes, there were excesses, but on the whole the problem has been overcome. Meanwhile, alcohol consumption in the USSR at its peak, in 1984, reached 10.5 liters of pure alcohol per citizen - and now, according to WHO, it reaches 15 liters in Russia. Yes, the share of beer in the total volume has increased, and probably in 1984 more unaccounted for moonshine was made, but even official vodka is still drunk more than then. In terms of alcohol consumption, Russia is in fourth place in the world (they drink more of us - hello to the fraternal republics - Belarus, Moldova and Lithuania), a third of men die from alcohol in the country, two-thirds of suicides and 70% of murders are associated with it - and it seems like nothing. Academicians do not sound the alarm, writers do not write disturbing articles, there is no such topic.
In general, it would be interesting to write the history of the last 30 years through the prism of alcohol. "Amaretto" and alcohol "Royal" as social anesthetics in the period of transformations of the 1990s, the myth of the "dashing 90s" as a manifestation of withdrawal symptoms, the sports patriotism of the 2000s as a result of the growth in beer sales. The first chapter in this book would be devoted to the moment when the citizens of the country, like Neo in The Matrix, were disconnected from their usual life support systems, they emerged from the fog and suddenly saw empty shelves, and shabby porches, and a salary that could be paid in ten years. save up for collapsing Zhiguli. They saw it and realized that it was impossible. The last chapter for today would say that the new government does not repeat the mistakes of the previous one, it fights against alcohol, reducing the volume of advertising or banning the most harmful drinks - but not paying attention to either the amount of alcohol consumed or its social consequences, without showing anything, that there is such a problem. The Matrix works. Everything goes according to plan.