Russians drop heavy drinking

PROGRESS: CONSUMPTION 40% DOWN FROM 2000S

President introduced restrictions on alcohol sales and promoted healthy living.

Russians might have a reputation as a nation of hard drinkers, but a report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) published yesterday showed their alcohol consumption has dropped by more than 40% from its peak in the early 2000s.

The WHO put the decrease down to a raft of measures brought in since sport-loving President Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, including restrictions on alcohol sales and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.

“The Russian Federation has long been considered one of the heaviest-drinking countries in the world,” the report said, adding that alcohol was a major contributor to a spike in deaths in the 1990s. “However, in recent years these trends have been reversed.”

The study showed a 43% drop in alcohol consumption per capita from 2003 to 2016, driven by a steep decline in the consumption of bootleg booze. The authors said this trend was a factor in increased life expectancies, which reached a historic peak in 2018, at 78 years for women and 68 years for men. In the early 1990s, male life expectancy was just 57.

Under Putin, Russia introduced measures including a ban on shops selling any alcohol after 11pm, increases in the minimum retail price of spirits and an advertising blackout. In a central Moscow bar, drinkers said people were cutting down partly because of the restrictions, particularly on late-night alcohol sales in shops, but also due to changing lifestyles.

“People have changed their approach to drinking,” said Roman Pechnikov, a 38-year-old computer scientist. “They do not drink until the end of the night.”

Last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was so concerned at habitual drinking among workers that he led an anti-alcohol campaign with partial prohibition, which brought down consumption from the mid-1980s until 1990. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, alcohol consumption exploded, continuing to rise until the start of the 2000s. Earlier WHO figures showed Russian adults now drink less alcohol on average than their French and German counterparts.