Drowning one’s sorrows

You might think the end of December is a time for sipping champagne and making plans for the New Year. But in Irkutsk, 123 residents drank Boyaryshnik – a methanol-based bath product with extract of hawthorn – and 76 of them had no new year at all.

The story, however, is not about Russians’ propensity to drink anything that’s wet, but about corruption, poverty and monumental bureaucratic ineptitude.

In Russia, vodka is inexpensive, but in a country where even official statistics admit the existence of 23 million on the breadline, for many people 200 roubles per bottle (just over $3) is exorbitant. Vodka produced illegally is half the price, but even that is sometimes unaffordable. This leads to a spike in demand for all sorts of surrogates ­– from medicinal tinctures to alcohol-based perfume and cosmetic products. Russia numbers around 10-12 million permanent consumers of surrogate products, which, according to government figures, make up around 20% of the Russian alcohol market. Yet “it took nearly a hundred deaths in one go for someone to wake up to the fact that people have no money and are ready to drink any cheap gut rot,” raged journalist Anton Orekh.

A few weeks before the Irkutsk tragedy, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin, whose portfolio includes the alcohol market, said that the problem of consumption of ‘dual-use’ alcohol-based liquids had remained unresolved for more than six years, and urged his colleagues to focus on scrapping the red tape and to “put an end to the matter.” The foot-dragging ultimately cost the lives of 76 people in Irkutsk, yet still there is no guarantee that a solution will be found.

A year ago, for instance, Novaya Gazeta wrote that the situation was hopeless: “This is a government problem because local authorities cannot and do not want to fight this plague, and the law enforcement agencies admit they are powerless to do anything. This is a government problem, because the Health Ministry turns a blind eye to the holes in the law, while Rospotrebnadzor [national body responsible for consumer rights protection] does not care that people in Russia are dying from cheap slosh … Why? There can be only one explanation: The [vending] machines with alcohol-based liquids that dot the provinces are linked to big money and influential people.”

Opposition politician Alexei Navalny knows a lot about the beneficiaries of the surrogate trade: “We all know that this whole billion-rouble Boyaryshnik business is protected by officials. Like all alcohol-related topics, the FSB and siloviki [men in uniform] are behind it. Who’s behind the EGAIS system [an automated system that monitors the production and turnover of the alcohol industry — Ed.]? There was a lot of talk that it would sort out the alcohol market, but it’s become another feeding trough for the FSB.”

Online comments were generally more condemnatory than sympathetic. The reaction of former Russian Deputy Prime Minister and now popular blogger Alfred Koch summed up the mood: “If people drank bath lotion, they only have themselves to blame – not the producers or sellers. Not even Putin, who some say has caused a spike in heavy drinking. No one forced people to buy and drink a bottle labelled ‘bath lotion.’ They opened it themselves, put it between their lips and swallowed … People drink all kinds of muck because they’re [insane]. They’re just retards, that’s all. Sure, you have to feel sorry for them. But that doesn’t negate the above.”

Many, however, came out in support of the victims, albeit through criticising the authorities.

Alexandra Adelson: “All this ‘don’t drink lotion’ bull does my head in. That’s why they make it. It’ll soon be on the kiosk shelves next to beer. It’s never used ‘as intended,’ so to speak. No one puts it in the bath. The makers know perfectly well that people drink it, that’s why they produce so much of it. Shops also know that people drink it. People buy it to drink. Everyone knows that, yet there’s all this ‘for bathing and hygiene’ nonsense …”

Even committed supporters of the current regime note that there is something strange about the campaign to eliminate surrogate alcohol.

Irina Frolova: “It almost feels as if this Boyaryshnik racket extends all the way to the presidential administration. The Kremlin took Crimea in 2 days, but cannot beat a bottle of bath lotion. What a joke.”

Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the propaganda channel RT, offers a rather different take on the matter: “Friends, it’s always been this way. In the late Soviet Union, my childhood, it was the same. And on a far greater and worrying scale at that … Things are better now. You don’t need a magnifying glass to see some sort of movement in the right direction.”

Journalist and social activist Sergei Parkhomenko believes that today’s Russia has to be understood through the prism of this terrible event in Irkutsk: “This incident tops everything in terms of importance, for it strikes at the very meaning of life in Russia. It raises the question as to why people live such meaningless, miserable, empty lives that toxic chemicals are seen as a way out.”

Even as Russia discussed the Irkutsk tragedy, the president’s official website displayed a transcript of Putin’s recent address to the Federal Assembly, headlined by the Kremlin’s PR people with a suitably uplifting quotation: “Our whole policy is aimed at preserving the nation and multiplying Russia’s human capital as the country’s main source of wealth.”

Nonetheless, in 2014 (the latest data available) alcohol tinctures and antiseptics not intended for consumption claimed the lives of 45,000 Russian citizens.

God preserve us.