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1. Hazardous Drinking in Privatized Industrial Towns of Russia

Author:
Alexi Gugushvili, Aytalina Azarova, Darja Irdam, and Lawrence King
Publication Date:
12-2023
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
Hazardous drinking, defined as the consumption of homemade, unofficially made alcohol and non-beverages, is prevalent and accounts for a high proportion of alcohol-related deaths in Russia. Individual-level characteristics are important explanations of hazardous drinking, but they are unlikely to explain spatial variation in this type of alcohol consumption. Areas that attracted insufficient attention in the research of hazardous drinking are the legacy of industrialization and the speed of economic reforms mainly through the privatization policy of major enterprises in the 1990s. Applying multilevel mixed-effects logistic regressions to a unique dataset from 30 industrial towns in the European part of Russia, we find that in addition to individual-level characteristics such as gender, age, marital status, education, social isolation, labor market status, and material deprivation, the types of towns where individuals resided such as industrial structure and speed of privatization also accounted for the variance in hazardous alcohol consumption among both males and females.
Topic:
Privatization, Alcohol, Public Health, and Industry
Political Geography:
Russia and Eurasia

2. Governing Habits: Treating Alcoholism in the Post-Soviet Clinic, Eugene Raikhel

Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Video
Institution:
The Harriman Institute
Abstract:
Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years. Raikhel's book is more than a story about the treatment of alcoholism. It is also a gripping analysis of the many cultural, institutional, political, and social transformations taking place in the post-Soviet world, particularly in Putin's Russia. Governing Habits will appeal to a wide range of readers, from medical anthropologists, clinicians, to scholars of post-Soviet Russia, to students of institutions and organizational change, to those interested in therapies and treatments of substance abuse, addiction, and alcoholism.
Topic:
Health, Mental Health, Alcohol, Post-Soviet Space, and Addiction
Political Geography:
Russia and Europe

3. Did Alcohol Policy Really Cause the Postsocialist Mortality Crisis? Revisiting the Rebound and Affordability Hypotheses

Author:
Aytalina Azarova, Gabor Scheiring, Michael Ash, and Lawrence King
Publication Date:
04-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts Amherst
Abstract:
This paper reexamines the argument that alcohol policies were the major factor behind the mortality crisis in postsocialist Russia. We show that the correlation between the Gorbachev anti-alcohol campaign (rebound hypothesis), alcohol prices in the 1990s (affordability hypothesis), and mortality reported in previous analyses is not robust to splitting oblasts into Far- East and the rest of Russia. Our analysis conducted on a sample of 534 towns in the European part of Russia also finds no robust evidence supporting the two hypotheses. In contrast, findings linking privatization to mortality are robust to controlling for the anti-alcohol campaign and the affordability of alcohol.
Topic:
Health, Political Economy, Mortality, Alcohol, and Affordability
Political Geography:
Russia and Soviet Union