Soviet and Russian Statistics on Alcohol Consumption and Abuse

The purpose of this paper is to summarize and offer analytical comments concerning the availability and reliability of official government statistics on alcohol and related issues in the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. The paper is organized in six section. The introduction (Section 1) summarizes state alcohol policy issues. Sections 2 and 3 are focused on, respectively, alcohol consumption and on alcohol abuse statistics. Sections 4 and 5 address two issues related to alcohol abuse: the impact of Gorbachev's anti-drinking campaign and deaths from alcohol poisoning: these issues which remain controversional illustrate problems of working with available Russian statistics. Section 6 lists bibliographical sources used in the paper