One Russian is a drunkard,

Resume

This paper represents a contribution to the research, which has become fashionable in recent years, on men’s drinking habits in modern-day Russia (Lisitsyn 1990, Pokhlebkin 1991, Zaigraev 1992, Nemtsov 1996, White 1996, Simpura and Levin 1997). Heavy drinking and excessive alcohol consumption are widely reported to be typical of Russian everyday life. In both professional and public discussions it is most often the negative consequences of alcohol abuse that are identified, such as disruptive, anti-social behaviour, economic loss, moral degradation, and a decline in the health of population.

Our approach is different. Our research concentrates on the rationale and justifications people give to the widespread, excessive consumption of alcohol. We start with the simple question: if the effects of alcohol are all bad, why do people drink so much - are they insane or irrational? What do the heavy drinking habits of Russian men imply? While heavy drinking (and alcoholism) as a bio-medical-social phenomenon is a serious and tragic problem in the Russia, heavy drinking as a performative / narrative phenomenon may have diverse and conflicting meanings. It can provide “endless possibilities for the elaboration of an ironic resistance to the mundane, practical disciplines of family, community, and state” (Ries 1997: 69); it can be deconstructed as a practice that either celebrates the man’s identity, or testifies to crisis of masculinity.

Using the biographical method, we have reconstructed contexts from the life-stories of Russian heavy drunkards, which have helped to reveal different patterns of male drinking behaviour. The technique of narrative analysis proves to be efficient in the reconstruction of the meanings and contexts of contemporary Russian drinking patterns.

In this research, field work is combined with the analysis of mass media and professional discourse, which provides a background understanding of the structural features of the contemporary phenomenon of drinking amongst Russian men.

The first part covers the analysis of public discourse on heavy drinking in Russia. In the second part, a narrative analysis of the ‘drinking stories’ is provided.

In public discourse, the issue of heavy drinking and alcoholism in Russia became widely discussed during the Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign (1985). We examined the discourse on heavy drinking and alcoholism from 1980-1998 by scanning Russian national and St.Petersburg newspapers that were in mass circulation at the time: ‘Trud’, ‘Segodnya’, ‘Tchas Pik’, ‘Nevskoje vremya’, ‘Izvestija’, ‘Argumenty i Facty’. We also covered the journals ‘Vestnik Statistiki’, ‘Sotsialnaja i klinicheskaya psykhiatrija’, ‘Sociological Journal’, ‘Sociologicjeskije issledovanija’, in which professional discussion on heavy drinking was taking place.

We consider the discussion of alcoholism and heavy drinking to be an important contribution to political discourse. The logic of the argument is as follows: heavy drinking and alcoholism, it is agreed, have long been a social problem in Russia. As with any other social problem – the growth of the crime rate, demographic decline, an increased rate of mortality, and juvenile delinquency - this issue is ascribed a meaning dependent on the basic discourse on reforms. We claim that nothing that is said on this topic (as a social problem) is free of political implications.

The technique of discourse analysis helps to identify the major reasons for heavy drinking in Russia, along with the main culprits who are held responsible for this popular self-destructive practice, and the scope of suggested remedies. Discourse on heavy drinking, as the discussion of any social problem, is looked upon as justification (ideological) discourse that has a political implication (action oriented).

The fervour of the official discourse of the 1980s was directed at the exposure of alcoholism and the ascription of guilt on alcoholics themselves (Simpura 1997). Since 1990 the discussion has become less politicised and we are now witnessing a stable professional interest in this topic. Today the diversity of opinions is becoming increasingly apparent and pronounced.

We identified the following basic frames of heavy drinking in Russia: heavy drinking as a Russian cultural tradition; heavy drinking in the Soviet era; heavy drinking as a personal fate; heavy drinking as a result of the post-Soviet crisis.

The theory of heavy drinking as a Russian cultural tradition has a long history (Novgorodtsev 1909, Bekhterev 1927, Bestuzhev-Lada 1996). In this case the authors give convincing examples of drinking in everyday life, but do not discuss the causes of this tradition. Their main idea is that drinking in Russia is a psychological and cultural trait that is difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate.

Discourse on Soviet heavy drinking blames the Communist state for mass alcoholism. The Russian heavy drunkard is seen as a victim of state manipulation who cannot really be held responsible for his/her self-destructive practices. The remedy for mass heavy drinking, according to this view, is compassion and the treatment of drunkards, as well as political resistance. This discourse may also be deemed medical, since it addresses issues of health, disease and medical treatment. It is often supported by demographical arguments, such as the growth of the death rate and a low birth rate. This kind of interpretation has been the most popular in the mass media since the beginning of the 1990s. Recent versions of this theory ascribe heavy drinking to a wide-range of consequences of the anti-alcohol politics of Gorbachev (Medvedev 1996, Filippov 1997).

Heavy drinking as a personal fate: In this case the authors observe concrete reasons and invent concrete remedies for alcoholism. They argue for empirical research on the causes of drinking and the taking of tangible measures to overcome this ‘disease’. This kind of argument was found to be quite rare (Tuchin 1985).

Discourse on heavy drinking as a result of the post-Soviet crisis sees alcoholism and self-destructive practices as negative consequences of the transformation of modern-day Russia - mass unemployment, disruptions in the pattern of life, social and political instability, etc. In this case reforms are seen as major reasons for the increase of heavy drinking. The remedies are not examined (Birjukova 1996).

Discourse on the remedies for heavy drinking: Two conflicting discourses on the remedies for heavy drinking can be identified. Very few authors claim that the introduction of a ‘dry law’ represents an efficient remedy for alcoholism and heavy drinking (Uglov 1985). Another group claims that a temperance law will not be effective, nor will it be implemented under current socio-political conditions, although it may indeed be a good measure for the regulation of drinking. They support the policy of cultural drinking: according to this approach, the development and dissemination of so-called civilised drinking patterns may act as a barrier for excessive drinking with all its damaging consequences (Bestuzhev-Lada 1996).

Empirical studies identified specific features of Russian drinking patterns. The level of alcohol consumption in Russia is one of the highest in Europe, together with France, Spain and Portugal. However, both the structure of consumption, and the drinking patterns are of a specific nature. This specificity can be summarised as a ‘northern’ type of drinking, which presupposes two main features of the drinking patterns: the predominance of hard spirits and the large amount of alcohol consumed at any one sitting. Other specifically Russian factors include the low quality of alcohol and moonshine and a poorly nourished population. All these factors make the consequences of alcohol consumption especially severe for the Russian population. According to empirical studies, Russian drinking is characterised by the high level of intoxication. The work place is an important setting in the formation of drinking habits and Russians do not differentiate between drinking on the weekends and on weekdays. Soviet drinking habits indicate the cyclical nature of drinking – zapoi (drinking bout) and drinking on paydays. Women claim to drink less than men do. Russians do not express concerns about drinking (see J. Simpura and B. M.Levin (1997), A.V. Nemtsov (1996, 1997), A.Z. Shamota (1995), B. Brui (1997), V. Shkolnikov (1997), J.I. Bytko (1988), V.T. Kondrashenko (1988), I.A. Gorkovaya (1994), A.G. Gofman (1997))..

In spite of the important results made in earlier studies, we believe that quantitative research is not sufficient for the understanding the meanings of heavy drinking in Russian culture. The aim of our study is to analyse how these traits of Russian drinking, take root in the individual lives; to identify the circumstances (contexts) that have exerted a formative influence on daily drinking habits in the late Soviet and post-Soviet era; the meaning that alcoholics ascribe to their drinking.

Our empirical study aims at the reconstruction of scripts of drinking: (1) the contexts and (2) the meanings of heavy drinking from the life stories related by Russian men. Contexts provide the framework for meanings. We focus on reconstructing the contexts that cause heavy drinking amongst Russian men to be sustainable and continuous.

We consider biographical method to be an efficient tool for the study of meanings and practices of everyday life. In the course of our study, thirty (30) focused biographical interviews were conducted with men who drink heavily. The sample was formed with the help of the snowball technique. Respondents were chosen from those who agreed to discuss their personal drinking problems with the interviewer.

Script Theory as the Methodology of interpretation of biographical narratives. A modified version of the script theory of J. Gagnon was used in the analysis of the narratives presented in the life stories. (Gagnon 1990, Temkina 1998). J. Gagnon distinguishes three levels of scripting that can be identified within a narrative: cultural, inter-relational and personal scripts. Cultural scripts are norms and instructions that structure individual experiences. Inter-relational scripts are trajectories of relationships as they are narrated. Personal scripts are conceived as trajectories of the course of one’s (sexual) life, which orient themselves within inter-relational and cultural scripts. Script theory is a useful technique for organising the analysis of a text. We use the idea of “script” in a slightly different way, adjusting it to the aims of our research, i.e. to reconstruct social and cultural drinking scenarios. We have retained the term “script” because it points to structural conditions conducive to certain practices.

We understand a “script” as a metaphor. On the one hand it is determined by social structures and that is the reason why people inadvertently follow it in their everyday life. In this case the scripts are contexts of drinking which define drinking practices. People face these contexts in the course of their lives. They are reported to us in the form of stories about incidences of drinking at certain times and in certain places and within corresponding practices.

On the other hand, we perceive a “script” as the unity of narrative and corresponding experience, organised as a semantic unity. We can illustrate this thesis as follows: we cover the story about drinking and alcoholic experience with numerous justifications, explanations and interpretations, i.e. meanings that the narrators ascribe to everyday drinking practices. We intended to expose those various meanings that are usually interwoven into contexts. At the same time we build up a certain hierarchy of meanings by underlining the meaning that has become the main one for a certain group of narratives.

Thus we define a “script” as the configuration of everyday practices in the consumption of alcoholic beverages. This configuration of practices, in its turn, is represented in a concrete script through the combination of contexts and meanings ascribed to set practices.

We gave a name to each script that encapsulates the key meaning that was reconstructed from the narratives about drinking. It is not an individual script. Instead, it represents a certain group experience - a unity of meanings shared by an unspecified number of people – and the contexts that they all come into contact with.

Thus, using the script frame for the analysis of life stories we focus on the following issues: (1) the contexts that are presented as conducive of specific heavy drinking practices; (2) meanings and justifications for heavy drinking given by the narrators.

The purpose of script analysis as a narrative analysis is to reconstruct the frames of heavy drinking as an exercise in masculinity in Russian culture today. Individual scripts (as presented by the narrators) are looked upon as the frames for cultural scripts. Scripts may cover a whole lifetime or refer to a certain period only. More often than not we can detect several scripts in one biography.

This research does not claim to be comprehensive. However, it helps to reconstruct the piece of mosaic that is made available by our fieldwork. Our sample are men who were socially conditioned in Soviet times and whose drinking habits have been influenced by the changes in everyday life that have occurred during the last decade.

The report will proceed in the following way. We present drinking scripts based on the modal biographies. Each script is organised into the experiences and relevant contexts that were crucial in certain life stories. Thus we consider childhood experiences and the individual’s first recollections of and encounters with drinking; school and adolescence; professional life; family and leisure time. Our specific topics are: everyday drinking, the drinking schedule, drinking preferences, hangovers, drinking companions and group drinking rituals, ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ consequences of drinking as reported by the narrators; drinking and social control; and personal reflections on the influence and effects of drinking on the life of the individual concerned.

Script 1. Soviet film studio employee. Dima. This script is organised into two semantic units. The first is connected with drinking as an everyday practice and as a part of the many years of professional activity of a man working in a film studio; in this case, of an assistant to the director of photography. It is the specific professional environment and the life style it engenders that have become the key topic in this description of ‘drinking career’. The second unit found in this script is drinking provoked by the destruction of a former lifestyle, i.e. the drinking habits of a Soviet man who does not fit into the new context. Each unit comprises its own important narratives, stories describing circumstances, experiences and contexts.

Family and childhood memories: Dima belonged to a lower-middle class family. His father was a driver in the military and his mother was a salesperson.

The image of the father is an important point of reference in Dima’s story. Dima emphasised his sociability, cheerfulness, good looks and charming social demeanour:

At the same time, references to his father’s drinking habits are to be heard throughout Dima’s story. He sees his father’s drinking as normal male behaviour:

In general, his father’s image, including his regular drinking, is an important pattern for Dima’s male socialisation. Other childhood memories, including those of a street culture, proved to be unimportant in the framing of his future drinking experiences. As both of Dima’s parents had full time jobs, he attended Soviet childcare institutions (which was typical for Soviet children) and spent much of his time without his parents. He recalls the 1950s as a cheerful time of street games.

Dima recollects: ‘We played all the games we knew, I swear. We did not have skates, but we played hockey without skates... We played in the streets and sometimes hurt the passers by... That was happiness. We played and nobody got angry with us...’

Drinking debut: Dima’s drinking and sexual initiation took place in his late teens. At that time (end of 1950s - early 1960s) youth culture included such practices as attending the city dance halls. Dances were held in the Houses of Culture. ‘There we learnt about love’, Dima says. ‘We picked up women and they fucked us. And we did not know how to do it. I was 18 years old at the time’.

It was common practice for the youngsters to drink a glass of dry wine for courage before dancing. Later the weak wine was substituted with a fortified one: they would get a lift from the cheap port after which they ‘felt girls’ asses’. Inspirational drinking was considered to be a necessary part of teenage sexual life.

We would like to emphasise the following features of this initial period of drinking 1) its homosocial character - it is exclusively male drinking; 2) the combination of drinking and sexual experience; 3) the poor quality of cheap drinks consumed during this initial phase.

Dima’s biography includes the experience of military service as a necessary institution for male socialisation. His fondest memories are still of the military service (1964-1968), and this experience is important for his understanding of true manhood and its corresponding values, attitudes and practices.

In Dima’s life story the military service is reported to be a school of true masculinity which made him an adult and separated him from his family.

He was recruited to the paratroopers for three years. Dima claims that the army of the 1960s was very different from that of later times. The officers had the heroic flair of WWII veterans. His fellow service men were all Leningraders and a special qualification was required to make Dima’s division of the armed forces.

Jobs. Heavy drinking in the work place: Dima failed to enter university. He had several jobs and got several qualifications before he started to work as a cameraman. His first job did not demand much. Heavy drinking in the work place marked Dima’s working-class experience, as in many other cases. He remembers that his main task was ‘to go unnoticed from the plant during working hours and, by the end of the day, to put a bottle of vodka on the table’. Dima is convinced that drinking at the plant taught him to drink vodka, since ‘they drank every day at the end of the working day.’

Life as a studio employee: When Dima finally started to work as a cameraman at the studio, his greatest dreams came true. During 25 years of his work there (1970-1995) he progressed from a cameraman’s assistant to the positions of a second cameraman.

The story of studio life is the backbone of this drinking script, and we have labelled the script accordingly. The job afforded Dima a lot of pleasure and interest. He appreciated the content of the work and its prestige. It also gave him the opportunity to travel all over Russia during shooting periods. Adventure was another feature of the cameraman’s professional life.

Dima recounts: ‘I loved to work in the studio…: everything there was different compared with normal routine life. I got masses of new friends, acquaintances, semi-friends and quarter-friends. I knew practically everybody there... by his or her first name. And everybody knew me’.

Studio life was a combination of professional and private interaction. It was common practice to have love affairs at work, and, as elsewhere, drinking in the work place was habitual.

Drinking at work in the studio was regulated by traditions. Usually, drinking in the work place was scheduled by the ritual of celebrating every small step in the making of a film.

The topography of drinking is of special interest in Dima’s story. For the most part, his drinking took place at the studio and in street-corner cafes. Amongst the places at work in which drinking took place, Dima mentions cameramen’s booths, film directors’ offices and cafes at the studio.

‘Sobering-up’ stations. State control over drinking on the streets has been implemented through a system of‘sobering-up’ stations. Drunken men were often taken to such places from the streets and cafes. According to administrative law, officers had to inform the administration at the individual’s place of work of such instances. AS a consequence drunkards were subjected to various administrative sanctions ranging from ‘moral reprimand’ to benefit cuts. This happened to many, if not everyone, from our sample of respondents. However, Dima did his best to escape this fate. With the help of the female secretaries in the studio, Dima and his drinking buddies managed to intercept the inevitable notification letters from the drunk tank. Afterwards, they would celebrate their victory with a bottle of wine in the cameraman’s booth with the girls who had helped them.

Life-crisis: The reforms of the 1990s were crucial to the change of Dima’s drinking from a festive practice, to drinking as a symptom of a crisis of masculinity. Dima was made redundant whilst the studio was going through an economic crisis. He did not go for any professional training courses and his only opportunity was to get a low-level job. After his dismissal, Dima spent three years working as a plant watchman. The work was boring and badly paid. Later he left this job and now assesses his personal condition as ‘an absolute breakdown’.

In the course of the countrywide changes, Dima’s world collapsed. He claims that ‘everything became much worse. First, I was deprived of a regular income. Second, I was deprived of all my friends…We meet very seldom… now’.

The studio crowd broke up: ‘Everybody scattered after two years of chaos at the studio. Some people work as bricklayers, others... sweep the streets near metro stations...’

Drinking during the period of reforms: from celebration to lament. Dima assesses the change in his status as unfair. He thinks that most of the men who were dismissed during the economic crisis were high-class professionals. He is convinced that heavy drinking today is caused by individual crises, resulting from the economic reforms. ‘Now,’ according to the narrator, ‘ people do not want to go home, because they don’t know what to tell their wives when they don’t bring home money for the family’. Now Dima drinks at every possible occasion. He often drinks alone if he can find a bottle, or joins a group of complaining middle-aged men at a drinking place.

Describing the changing meanings of his drinking from celebration to lament, Dima observes that nowadays men visit drinking places not to celebrate, but to complain. Every drinking establishment - shalman, drop-in-place, kapelnitsa - has its own crowd and strangers rarely venture in. These places have become specific men’s clubs where people ‘forget their homes…They tell of how everything is going to pieces in their lives, how their career is falling apart, how their wife has left them, how the kids do not pay attention, how their young mistresses has told them to go away until they can earn more money....’

Dima believes that, under current conditions, the men of his age and qualification are a lost generation, even though they are professionals with some 30 years of work experience. He looks to the future with horror and expects to remain unemployed. He has already encountered age discrimination at hiring. As soon as he announced his age (52), an employer said: ‘Thank you, goodbye. Close the door on your way out.’

Justification and motivation for drinking: Dima’s interpretations of drinking are numerous. He differentiates between drinking as a festive celebration of masculinity and drinking as a lament over failed masculinity. Drinking as a celebration of masculinity - part of festive life along with sexual and professional achievement - is one of the important meanings ascribed to these practices. Another meaning of drinking is inspiration - it makes life bright, vivid, adventurous and interesting. Thus the life of the Soviet studio employee was a constant holiday - it was joyful, harmonious and interesting.

The change in the meaning of drinking coincides in his story with the loss of his much-loved job, which turned habitual drinking into desperate alcoholism. Now Dima sees himself as a looser. He believes that his passage from customary (normal) drinking to alcoholism is marked by the social changes in the country and, most of all, by the collapse of his job. He argues: ‘Now people drink from grief, from hopelessness...’

Dima also suffers from fear of loneliness and old age. ‘It is sad when you are jobless and without a family. In general, a person with nothing to do is only half a person. When a human being is alone, without work, money, prospects, and a future, it is just a collapse’.

Resume: The drinking script of the Soviet studio employee is built into the masculinity frame. He considers drinking to be a customary men’s practice, pursued by true men both on their good and bad days. His father – a drunkard - has remained a model for him. However, traditional masculinity presupposed drinking, but not alcoholism. One of the features of true masculinity is the acquired skill of drinking without getting drunk. In this case drinking is a celebration of masculinity. Drinking in the specific work place milieu is the practice that Dima followed during the 25 years of his career. The breakdown of Soviet masculinity in the course of reforms turned Dima into a down-at-heel, unemployed drunkard. The end of his story is permeated with the crucial feeling of the unrealised traditional concept of masculinity. He sees lament drinking as his only lot.

Script 2. Soviet Bohemian. Oleg: We define this script as Soviet Bohemian drinking. We find it in the lives of people who have had experience of living within Bohemian circles. The Bohemian lifestyle - that of the outcasts of the Soviet system - involved artistic creativity, dissident tendencies and forms of cultural protest against the system. Drinking in such an environment was viewed as a part of a culture of protest and a sign of creativity. The contexts for this drinking script are the Bohemian topography and underground cafes in the city.

Family and childhood memories: Oleg was born into a well-off, Soviet middle-class family. His mother was a chief engineer in a grocery firm and his father was a construction engineer.

Oleg observes that drinking was habitual amongst the men in his family. His father started drinking heavily during World War Two. “My father died from cirrhosis of the liver. All of my father’s side of the family were heavy drinkers. There are none on my mother’s side...”

From a very early age, Oleg proved to be a talented child. This talant also contributed to his future alcoholic practices.

The political context of Oleg’s upbringing is important in his story as it gives the background to the existence of Soviet Bohemia. Oleg claims that the political situation in the mid 1960s - 70s was of major importance for his personal formation. Although his school years basically fell in the period of ‘stagnation’ (end of 1970s - 80s), he was able to enjoy certain political openings of Khrushchev’s liberation, one of which was the city’s Youth Literary Club (1965).

Oleg contrasts the atmosphere in the Club with the one in school: ‘It was a veritable contrast of truth and lie, boredom and excitement, knowledge and hypocrisy.... In this place I met the people whom I love to this day. These were the most interesting people in my life’. Such clubs were conducive for Soviet dissent of the 1970s.

In this milieu, male youth friendship was one of the main attractions for the gifted teenagers. Oleg modelled his life on the practices of the older leaders of the Club. Older friends introduced drinking to their juniors.

Oleg’s drinking debut took place in this milieu. The first time Oleg got drunk was at the age of 15. He explains that it was the tradition of drinking as described in Russian literature that seduced him. He wanted to try the vermouth that Pasternak describes in one of his poems.

Other stories connect his drinking debut with the celebration of male youth friendship: ’We became friends because we sensed one another, we felt that we were all capable of making verses, and our tipple was a light wine...’

It was traditional for this band of young male poets and writers to drink in order to celebrate their literary community.

‘...Once when we were descending the luxurious stairs of the Palace of Pioneers we met a short, ugly-looking, very hairy man who was obviously of non-Russian origin. He approached us and said: “Where do you drink here?” We answered: “Up there, in the toilets.” So we went to the toilets. The guy, who was 8 years older and a poet from an elder generation - a very respectable one at that - took out a bottle and said: “I am NN.” This is how we got acquainted. He said: “Let’s stick together. Read me your poems.” So in these toilets we finished two bottles of red wine, got tipsy and went to his place for the first time’

In this fragment drinking is presented as a rite of inclusion into friendship and the literary community.

University years: Oleg studied at the philological department of the State University in the late 1960s. He was the head of the class Komsomol organisation. This status proved to be useful: money for drinking was borrowed from the Komsomol membership fees (2 kopecks per person each month) and later refunded.

Oleg’s story informs us about the drinking places that framed his drinking practices. Thus, for example, teenage drinking, being a forbidden practice, took place only in the boy’s toilets, on the stairs and in backyards, i.e. in places which are difficult to observe and control. Such places were conducive to specific drinking habits: low quality cheap drinks, fast drink, draining at one draught mostly from the bottle, rather than using a glass, often without snacks...

The young people and Bohemians developed a certain network of public places (cafes, coffee shops, and restaurants) for their drinking, such as the cafe near the university known as ‘Akademichka’, and cafe ‘Saigon’. In Oleg’s story these cafes are given special attention. He claims that people went there to avoid loneliness, ‘just to talk’, to join in with lively gatherings, or to communicate with somebody.

Jobs: Like many other Bohemians, Oleg was not well integrated into the Soviet structures. He was a poet, and for many years the jobs that he got had nothing to do with his literary skills. He earned money working low quality, poorly paid temporary jobs, as a watchman, assistant, technician, etc. These experiences, as in other cases, were marked by the drinking habits in the work place.

Oleg’s’ drinking story also gives us a narrative on drunk tanks. To escape the drunk tanks, Oleg preferred to drink in elite clubs, because ‘if you drink in the House of Writers or in any other elitist professional club, it is unlikely that you’ll be taken to the drunk tank’.

In Oleg’s story drinking is presented as a condition for adventure, when an unexpected situation could be exciting and fascinating. Oleg reports also on several suicide attempts provoked by heavy drinking and connected with love affairs and a general feeling of unhappiness.

Oleg contextualises his life story. The initial drinking of his teenage years was coloured by the atmosphere of political liberation and friendly communication at the Youth Literary Club. The heavy drinking of his adult years, filled with zapoi, began to take place against the gloomy background of ‘stagnation’ - ‘time without dates’. He confesses, ‘For me it was unimportant whether it was the time of Andropov, Chernenko, Brezhnev…’

Oleg’s story shows that the political atmosphere of ‘stagnation’ was conducive to Bohemianism and its drinking patterns. The Soviet Bohemians professed a commitment to united cultural opposition to the Soviet way of life. Oleg describes the collective feeling of euphoria, that was characteristic of the general atmosphere of Bohemian communication.

‘These were people who did not belong to the Soviet career-building institutions. This euphoria bound people together... And these sentiments caused me to make one mistake after another. I married several times, although I did not need this, and the vodka consumption was overwhelming. It just seemed that everything was normal.... I am very grateful for this time... but the problem was that I could not get out of this environment because it was the totality of my existence: poetry, drinking, funny pranks that were discussed throughout the whole city...’

The euphoria of Soviet ‘stagnation’ had another peculiar feature: it was essentially regulated by non-financial means. In the stories of Soviet drinking, financial issues are barely touched upon. When asked specifically about the financial side of drinking, our respondents reported that money came ‘from thin air’ or ‘they did not need any money’, etc. Several reasons can be found for this financial unconsciousness. The first is the cheapness of drink in general, and of adherence to the consumption of a large amount of low quality cheap drinks, in particular. The second reason was that individual life was organised on the basis of social networks and on barter exchange rather than money (see Ledeneva 1998). The third reason may be the collective character of drinking, which presumed the pooling of people’s resources, thereby making it easier to get alcohol: ‘For example, you could sit by the telephone and start calling your friends to find one with money to spend. You could meet a friend and sell empty bottles in order to purchase full ones.’

Oleg’s story shows that Bohemian drinking patterns were embedded in the Soviet structural conditions. Market and political reforms destroyed the Soviet Bohemian milieu and thus changed these habits. Many former Bohemians tried to quit drinking, and became professionally oriented instead, always claiming to have‘a lot of things to do’, as Oleg says. In 1991 Oleg was finally elected a member of the Union of Writers, he became widely published and started to earn money regularly through literary work.

However, for him, excessive drinking never ceased to be a habitual practice. It only became more regulated by his working schedule and health problems.

Reflections on drinking: Trying to justify his addiction, Oleg has developed a theory of drinking. Drinking is seen as an inevitable feature of human life. ‘It is necessary to live in peace with vodka, because you cannot beat it,’ claims the Bohemian. He distinguishes two types of drinking: ‘joyful drinking’ and ‘sorrow drinking.’ When the first has positive effects both on individual life and on one’s creative faculties, the second intensifies but cures sorrow and grief. Generally speaking, Oleg sees drinking as a positive inspiring habit which, if excessive, could have bad consequences. He recollects his attempts to stop drinking heavily. He connects these attempts with his will to work creatively and his attempts to be a good family man.

Resume: The Soviet Bohemian script presents the life-style a man of literary milieu. Oleg poeticises his drinking, justifying it as a necessary accompaniment to the creative literary process. Bohemian drunkards were characterised by their partial integration into Soviet social structures. Oleg constantly violated the Soviet official rules of the game. Drinking made him brave enough to follow this strategy. The meanings of heavy drinking as part of the Bohemian culture are diverse, including (1) celebration of liberation, (2) opposition to the Soviet regime, (3) celebration of male solidarity, and (4) friendship. He develops the idea of politically bound Soviet drinking. His drinking practices also reproduce those of the elder generation.

Script 3. Komandor/Polar researcher. Vlad. We define this script as the drinking of a Soviet superman who did not have a chance to realise his full potential. It is the story of a true man, a ‘komandor’, or a team leader. Such people view consumption of alcohol as the inevitable practice of a true man. The specific contexts that shape his drinking habits are: (a) the very “male” profession of the polar researcher, which strictly defines periods of work at the polar station and vacations, (b) the man’s position in the family - in the event of divorce, the man leaves the house to his ex-wife, hence the lack of a lodging of his own becomes the key point of the drinking narrative; (c) collapse of the Soviet superman script during the early period of Russian reforms in 1980 -90s.

Family, childhood memories and the image of the father: Vlad’s story can be interpreted as the story of a son. This means that the crux of Vlad’s narrative is the image of his father as a model of masculinity. Vlad’s father belonged to the elite of the Arctic and Antarctic investigations industry. Vlad constantly refers to the similarity of their faces and their lifestyles. Vlad was father-orientated in his school achievements as well as in his choice of profession. Important childhood memories are also connected to his relationship with his father, such as the hunting gun that he received on his 12^th birthday, and truly male leisure activities - hunting, fishing and hiking - that later became habitual for him. It was his father’s idea that Vlad should become a polar explorer.

Youth: Vlad became financially independent quite early, when he entered the Marine College in Leningrad and moved to the college barracks at the age of 17 (college years: 1972-1977). Vlad is highly satisfied with his education, because it was ‘a good school of true masculinity.’ The narrator believes that true masculinity is based on male friendship and solidarity, financial independence, sports, diverse skills of fending for oneself, expeditions – in short, everything he learnt in the all-male Marine College.

Being professionally successful and well integrated into the Soviet system, Vlad was active in the Komsomol, and he graduated from the Marine College with distinction. This was his first step in his Soviet career.

Job/Professional career: Vlad presents himself as an extremely career-oriented person. After the Marine College he went on to postgraduate studies, entered the Communist Party (CPSU), implementing his strategy for a Soviet career.

His profession of Arctic explorer is considered to be a romantic men’s one, in which no women are engaged. The work has a specific schedule. It involved winterings - long-term, men alone intensive seasonal work at the polar stations. Men on wintering got specific salary benefits - one could earn twice as much as on the mainland. Six months’ wintering gave place to six months of vacation.

Winterings demanded not certain personal traits– capacity for intensive and diverse work, feeling of solidarity, tolerance and discipline. Vlad’s story brims with professional pride. It is based upon his understanding of a wintering as a test of true masculinity. He claims that he successfully passed 5-6 winter terms between 1978 to 1991. The consequence of work organization of polar investigator is the rigid boundary between the rules of life at the winterings and rules of life on the mainland. This truly masculine work was complemented by truly masculine leisure time. After a wintering term, men felt strong, healthy and thirsty for the experiences of male leisure, interaction and sex.

When during winterings heavy drinking was not common because of intensive workload, vacations were accompanied by heavy drinking practices.

Vlad’s Soviet career as a real man developed quite smoothly. In 1988 Vlad defended his candidate thesis and thus became the head of the wintering program. He was satisfied with his work.

The beginning of the1990s was a turning point in many Soviet careers. For Vlad the reforms were central to the breakdown of the original design of his career. The last wintering at the polar station took place in 1991. Economic decline made it impossible to organise further expeditions. Vlad was faced with several options. He could have gone into business, as many of his colleagues did, but he chose to continue his scientific work and started to write his second dissertation. His income decreased significantly and, thus, he found a supplementary job as a watchman at a car park.

Vlad’s narrative about his current job situation is full of bitterness and disappointment. The life without winterings and expeditions seems extremely uninteresting for him. The only temporary relief left is hunting... His earnings are hardly enough to provide for his family (a wife, whose earnings are small and irregular, and a small daughter, born in 1996).

Political views: Vlad is quite ambiguous in his assessment of the Russian reforms. On the one hand he supports them, whilst on the other he is very critical of them: ‘This could only happen in our country. It’s just a delirium! – he says. ‘It is bad that economy broke down... Though I approve of what happened...’ Personal freedom is the main achievement of the reforms, in his view. ‘Now, if you want to go somewhere, you can get a contract and a job in Sweden. Where could you go during the Soviet era? ... Now life is more interesting’. The State and the KGB no longer interfere in personal lives.

Private life, free time and social intercourse: The private life of the polar researcher was scheduled by his job. Intensive winterings were followed by intensive vacations and romantic adventures. He spent vacations at resorts that were prestigious in Soviet times (the Baltics, Yugoslavia and the Black Sea), travelling with a group of friends. Vlad has been married four times. He gives various reasons for his divorces, one of which seemed to us to be particularly important to his story. His third divorce, in the late 1980s, he believes, was caused by the fact that he became underpaid and his wife turned into a businesswoman. He married for the fourth time in 1994.

We see from the explorer’s story that accommodation has been a fundamental problem for him. He has never had an apartment of his own and has always felt homeless. He says: ‘…It would be different if I had a place to live (zhilye). Everything is about having a dwelling. If I only had a corner of my own...’ Since he did not have an apartment of his own, he resided in the places where his wives lived and divorce left him without a place to live. Homelessness and unsettledness were a general feature of his disposition in life until his last marriage. This is his comment upon it: ‘When I came home, I did not feel at home... This was the reason that I was drawn out to see people... Once I lived at my friend’s place. Then another friend of mine helped me to rent a room. Then I lived in a student dorm. It was endless’.

Drinking during the polar researcher’s leisure time: Every time he returned from a wintering as a prosperous and attractive man with lots of money and an appetite for social life, he visited friends. Coffee, cognac and vodka all accompanied this rediscovered communication.

His drinking habits were conditioned by his unsettledness. Drinking in company became a habitual practice during post-wintering visits to the city. He reports that he drank almost every day and felt like he was on the verge of a breakdown. These were occasions when his drinking became excessive and heavy, with frequent zapoi (drunken bouts). ‘There was a moment when I was on the edge, I felt that I might fall down on the other side... But I was always assessing the situation as far as my drinking was concerned: how far down the path had I gone? Would it still be possible to stop?’

Vlad is conscious of the negative consequences of drinking, and he thinks that people should be wary of this habitual practice. He claims that his new family and his daughter help him to withdraw from the practices of homeless companionship drinking.

Justification and motivation for drinking: In Vlad’s story, drinking has several meanings. The crucial frame is drinking as an essential part of male culture in general - a ritual, a pattern of communication and a tool for managing stress. Vlad interprets heavy drinking as a drug for the treatment of psychological breakdowns. His psychological burnouts were caused by homelessness, the infidelity of his partners, and his insufficient earnings. He perceives all of these problems to be a crisis of the patterns of true masculinity that he wanted to follow all his life.

His drinking became excessive and self-destructive when other masculine practices – a well-paid job, independence, and a stable family life - deteriorated. The inconsistency of his status is the general cause of his heavy drinking and zapoi. Alcohol, in Vlad’s opinion, also has a positive effect. It helps people to relax and to cope with difficult situations.

He also believes widespread heavy drinking in Russia to be imbedded in contemporary social changes... ‘It is so (people drink a lot) because the time is such. ... Sometimes I just need to drink in order to overcome the feeling that I have to provide for my family and that I cannot do it in a dignified way. In fact, I know that, with my brains, I have potential... and if I worked in the West and had the same status, I would have a yacht and a country house. I have friends in the West, so I know what I am talking about. ... But why can’t I have the same things here?’

Resume: In the polar researcher’s story a crisis of masculinity is seen to be a major condition of excessive heavy drinking. Whereas normal, occasional, social drinking is seen as a normal masculine practice, excessive drinking is an instrument for stress management and compensation. The transformation of Russia called into question Vlad’s script of a true man as his father’s successor. In Soviet times he was a polar researcher, engaged in a male profession which was the basis of his high self-esteem. However, even at that time there were periods of profound discontent and drinking bouts. Vlad’s excessive drinking was caused by his realisation that he could not follow the ideal life of a true man. Now things are getting worse and better at the same time. Vlad’s status changed dramatically. This is a typical inconsistent status scenario, causing psychological breakdown. However, he feels personally happy with his wife and daughter and sees the breakthrough in his private life.

Script 4. The eternal teenager. Serezha: This script is centered on the experiences of the early destructive heavy drinking rooted in the teenage culture of the newly built, big-city suburbs to which Sergei belonged and which play an important role in his narrative. All of the following plots - drinking at work, during military service, the quasi-Bohemian drinking of his youth - derive from this initial experience.

Family and childhood memories: Serezha was born into a middle-class Soviet family of engineers. The family lived in a new district on the outskirts of Leningrad. His neighbourhood is famous for the delinquent behaviour of its teenage inhabitants.

Describing his school life, Serezha says that, in the final years, he attended school for just two hours each week. In this environment, self-destructive behavioural patterns were common from an early age. The older school children were drug addicts: they sniffed gasoline and drank vodka. They were so-called street children. The teachers let these boys of 12,14, and 15 years stay at home whenever the school was to be inspected, in order to avoid the inevitable conflicts with authorities.

Serezha gives a picturesque description of the place where he lived until he finished school:

The male youth culture was brutal and delinquent. In this milieu ‘it was better to know nothing, ride a motorcycle recklessly, be a loud lout, or be able to throw stones further than the others... You could only earn respect by being a good fighter’.

Drinking debut and drinking places: Drinking was habitual amongst the teenagers in this neighbourhood. They started mostly with cheap dry wine. With a lack of facilities for entertainment in the area, youths came together and drank on the stairs, on the wide expanses between the houses, in the backyards, where they were not supervised. By the age of 13 the drinking habits of a street boy would already have become ingrained. By that time the older brothers of his schoolmates had returned from prison and became the group leaders. They were all engaged in habitual drinking, siphoning off wine from the tanks at the nearby railroad. If they were caught, they would be imprisoned. Describing these orgies, Serezha recollects that they drank for weeks until the wine was finished, and after that they would go and get themselves another helping from the railroad tank, from which they stole another 60 litres. Days and nights rolled into one. All of these orgies took place at a friend’s apartment. Within a month all of Serezha’s drinking friends had been caught and put in prison. Serezha was alienated from this milieu as his family moved to another part of the city.

The narrator develops the whole theory of social distinction based on the idea of milieu. He understands the milieu - or ‘circle’, as he calls it - as based on a peer group that is united by common behavioural patterns and interests, heavy drinking, together with delinquent, violent and illegal behaviour, being a core activity.

He recollects: ‘I learned… that there is ... the circle in which people live only through drinking... I lived in this world and got to know how it all happens. I slept in their dormitory, in one place or another.… It is not that your personality is degraded by it; it simply adapts to it, and there is no way out. It is a particular (social) position.’

Every incident that Serezha reports includes a drinking story. Even in hospital, after an eye injury that he received in a street fight (in 1979), he managed to make provision for drinking in the company of other male patients. They preferred low quality, cheap port, which is detrimental to one’s health.

Jobs: After 10 years at the comprehensive school, Serezha entered a technical high school, but soon left it and never continued his studies. He remained jobless for some time, having a lot of free time that he did not know how to spend.

The young man’s experience of work seemed more like leisure time, and drinking was part of the working pattern. Low working class drinking is part of this script.

Military service: Serezha’s years as a conscript (1984-1986) were also full of drinking experiences. It was his duty to buy drinks for the older soldiers.

Serezha’s experience in the army and in his various jobs shows a lack of responsibility, the inefficiency of social control mechanisms, and a lack of discipline. This is why we have called the script ‘the Eternal Teenager’.

After military service, Serezha entered the milieu of the late Soviet underground, mixing with hippies or people of the system, as they called themselves (end of the 1980s). Their lifestyle was similar to the one described in the Bohemian script, though there were differences in the meaning of drinking. Bohemians were firmly oriented towards creative work, including poetry, art and underground philosophy. They had their own ‘sense of life’ and they were critical of the regime. Serezha’s milieu of the younger generation was less romantic. Many of them combined heavy drinking with drugs.

Serezha claims to have been apolitical, marginal to the Soviet way of life, and professes a low level of integration into the Soviet structures. He reports his heavy drinking as a part of his escapist, unruly practices. A depressive condition has also been part of his drinking habits. On the other hand, he describes his political views of the Perestroika period as anti-Soviet:

Justification for drinking: Serezha is an eternal teenager. He considers consumption of alcohol to be a normal male practice. His main thesis corresponds with that stated by other narrators: men always drink, a normal man must drink. The other meaning of drinking is identified as a way of spending time in the company of friends, when conversation is accompanied by alcohol. Such interaction is romanticised and remembered as a holiday occasion. One more meaning is youth and the counter-cultural nature of Sergei’s drinking as the lifestyle engendered by his millieu – that of a youth subculture of hippies and “people of the system”.

Resume: Serezha’s script is based on the teenage milieu. Patterns of leisure that he developed within it were later reproduced in the other contexts, such as the military service, his low quality temporary jobs, and the youth subculture. This is the story of a person who did his best to escape adult responsibilities. He left everything - his house, his girlfriend, the army, school and his parents. We see his drinking as an essential component of these leaving strategies. Drinking made it easier for him to reject the responsibilities of adult life in Soviet and post-Soviet society.

The backbone of this drinking script is the perpetuation of the working class way of life. His story frequently refers to the drinking experiences of the working class, to which he and his parents belong. This script is a typical example of drinking among the lower strata of the working class, in which people perform unchallenging manual jobs. Here it is evident that the son has inherited his parents’ way of life. We can speak of it as ‘cultural-genetic drinking’. It affects the whole life of the individual, both during the working day and in his free time.

Family and childhood memories: Sasha’s parents also belonged to the lower-working class. His father was a driver, later an invalid, and his mother was a cleaning lady. They drank regularly, often having drinking bouts (zapoi).

Sasha graduated from secondary school in 1985 and entered the technikum. His memories of school are not vivid or bright. Sasha was known as a modest, unambitious young man. Although teenage fights were common in his milieu, he did his best to avoid them. It was difficult to provoke him. Thus he remembers being involved in only two really brutal fights in his adolescence.

Sasha was passive and unimaginative. His classmates organised regular trips to the countryside, but he did not usually take part in them. He describes himself as a calm, quiet person. He had a friend who was equally quiet. Life went smoothly, without incident and with nothing in particular to report.

Drinking debut: The first drinking experience he had was in his final year at the technical college in his friend’s company. They failed an exam and, sitting in a stairwell, drank cheap dry wine straight from the bottle to console themselves.

The first time Sasha felt really drunk was when he mixed red wine and beer, drinking in the company of his friend in a stairwell. As a rule men emphasised the effect of mixed drinks in uncomfortable conditions they experienced as young men - in the street, in the toilets, or just on the stairs where people got drunk and urinated.

Heavy drinking (large quantities per sitting) became a stable pattern of Sasha’s interaction with his only friend. Every time they met, they bought cheap wine. Sometimes they mixed it with beer to get more drunk. When they were drunk, everything seemed more interesting and adventurous.

Jobs and drinking in the work place: Sasha was a technologist by profession, but worked as a machine operator. He was not highly qualified and worked on the old equipment. Before being fired, Sasha worked at a cigarette factory that was characterised by bad working conditions, dust, etc. He was fired in 1998 for stealing cigarettes from the factory.

His story refers several times to drinking in the work place, which was considered normal in his milieu. The concrete situations for drinking in the work place were diverse: the celebration of birthdays and state holidays, pay days, piece-work, overtime and many others. Soviet collectivism presumed that any event whatsoever warranted a celebration accompanied by alcohol. At the male workshops in industrial plants, workers usually drank vodka or pure alcohol, which could easily be got for free from the plant’s repair shop. Sasha reports that at the factory where he worked, everybody was constantly tipsy and, although this surprised him at first, he later accepted it as the norm.

Sasha’s story includes several episodes describing his experiences in ‘sobering-up stations’.

‘…It happened at the plant just after we had received an advance on our wages. It was probably the first time that I got really heavily drunk. Being drunk already, we decided to go for a smoke in our workshop, and a watchman called the police.... After that we drank heavily in a doorway near to a metro station. I proved to be the healthiest of the three of us. One of the guys could not stand and fell over. I tried to pick him up but at that very moment a police car – the ‘mop up mobile’ - arrived and took them away.’ As a result, one of them was beaten up by the policemen and lost all his money. Sasha believes that the money was taken by the policemen themselves.

We come across stories about drunk tanks in many narratives. Drunkards tried to escape them and preferred to find safe places for drinking, but often they were unable to do so since the drunk tanks were obliged to reach set quotas for the number of drunkards detained. Heavy drinking in public places resulted in drunken men being picked up off the streets and taken to the drunk tanks.

Female patronage: Sasha’s story is a striking example of the female domination in the everyday life of passive men. His life was run by women: first his grandmother took care of him, and later it was his mother who decided on his education, choosing the high technical school that was close to his home. She also arranged his first marriage. Sasha’s mother-in-law found him a job at the cigarette factory: ‘It was her idea. I did not have any acquaintances there,’ he says. ‘I never made decisions. I just submitted. When my mother was alive she made decisions for everybody’. Sasha explains his passive role by a lack of motivation. He says: ‘I never knew what I wanted to do with my life’.

At the age of 18 Sasha married a girl of his age. She studied at the same technical school in the year below and belonged to the same milieu: their mothers worked at the same tobacco factory. Until the death of Sasha parents, when they moved into their own apartment, the young couple had shared accommodation with either his or her parents. Sasha gave all his salary to his wife and left only a little pocket money for himself. They made purchases together and his wife tried to stimulate his interest in various leisure activities. On the whole, however, they preferred to visit friends. Every visit was accompanied by traditional heavy drinking.

Sasha admits lack of personal autonomy, and female domination in his first marriage: ‘Generally speaking I did not have anything of my own in the apartment where we lived together. My mother-in-law lived with us. She is O.K., but I wasn’t living in my own place, so I didn’t interfere in anything’.

He wanted to escape overwhelming control of women and was looking for a new situation in which he would be the head of the family. Sasha separated from his first wife after six years of marriage, because ‘it just happened’. He had got himself a mistress and decided to stay with her. In his new partnership his cohabitant is even less innovative than he is. Now Sasha keeps all the money and makes all the purchases himself. His wife has remained unemployed. She spends most of her time in their small apartment with her mother.

In spite of the fact that from an early age Sasha had a critical attitude towards heavy drinking, watching its destructive consequences in his parental family, he has not managed to escape the same pattern. Drinking was normal not only in the work place, but also in the family. The family had a stereotype of the Sunday family dinner at Sasha’s mother-in-law’s place. Each weekend she cooked dinner for them and bought a bottle of vodka: this was her ritual of hospitality. Drinking as a substitute for stimulating leisure pursuits and as a substitute for imaginative behaviour are characteristic meanings for this script. It is difficult to see a possible way out of this drinking script.

Sasha is passive, his life is eventless, though it is full of problems that urgently require solutions. Both he and his wife are unemployed, yet neither of them is looking for a job. Their unemployment benefit is extremely low. The only person who works in their family is his mother-in-law.

The justification and motivation for drinking in Sasha’s story is not sophisticated. He says that he drinks for relaxation and to alleviate the unbearable boredom of his existence. He says, ‘All my adventures take place when I am drunk. Mostly, when nobody is around, I drink and go to bed. But my drinking friends are always in search of adventure.’

Resume: In Sasha’s story of working class drinking, the latter is seen to be a phenomenon that is being perpetuated by the second generation. For his milieu heavy drinking is a habitual practice that is encountered everywhere - at work, in one’s free time, both on public holidays and on weekdays. They drink to celebrate and relax, in grief and in happiness. They perpetuate drinking as an integral part of the lifestyle of their social class. Men and women here drink as equals. They usually prefer to drink cheap fortified wines, vodka or beer, and they drink to get drunk. Sometimes the drinks are mixed to enhance their effect. We have heard similar stories of working class drinking in many narratives, including ‘Bohemian’ and ‘Eternal Teenager’.

The following script is centered on vigorous student drinking as a part of male student camaraderie. One may hope that this type of drinking will exhaust itself when the structural conditions alter. A specific feature of drinking amongst the new generation is the fact that it is accompanied by the use of drugs.

Family and childhood memories: Grisha did not know his father because his parents divorced when he was just a child. However, he is often mentioned in the family because he was a drunkard, and now Grisha’s relatives are afraid that his drinking is a genetic pattern that he has inherited from his father. Grisha lives with his mother and stepfather, whom he respects very much and regards as a model man.

Grisha went to a typical working class school in the closest neighbourhood. It was one of those neighbourhoods, where ‘in the third form children start smoking, in the fourth they discover beer and develop a taste for it, and in the fifth form they sniff ‘Moment’’² He describes the same kind of milieu that we find in the Eternal Teenager script. However, Grisha distanced himself from this milieu. ‘Our class was a … rabble and I did not like it,’ he comments. ‘I simply had very different interests... I really did not like their demonstrative rudeness - the way they held cigarettes between their teeth, the way they addressed people: ‘give me 20 kopecks’…It was really cheap. I did not like it and I never behaved that way myself’.

Although teenage backyard culture was an important factor in Grisha’s socialisation, he escaped identification with it. His orientation on his family and home can be seen as a guarantee for his escape. But this is only the beginning of the story.

When he was 15, Grisha’s family moved to the centre of the city. The change of living environment totally changed Grisha’s entire life and philosophy. Whereas before he had been a lonely homebody who was opposed to a brutal masculine environment, in the new neighbourhood he at last ‘...realised what friendship is, what it is like when the class is really great, when everyone is together, and it is joyful and everybody around you is smart.’

However, in the centre the brutal teenage street life proved to be very similar to that of the distant neighbourhoods. ‘The former graduates… beat us up because we were newcomers.’ This pattern served as an initiation ritual. Seeking revenge in this fight, Grisha took up wrestling. Sport in his story is the part of male culture that provides a means for self-defence and self-assertion

Student Life (end of the 1980s - beginning of the 1990s). We see this period as crucial in the framing of his type of drinking. After finishing school at the age of 18, Grisha entered the humanitarian department of the University. This marked the beginning of his youth and its drinking experiences. To understand the meaning of these drinking practices we have reconstructed the political context of the period and the student cultural patterns that were typical for Grisha’s milieu.

The political context of Grisha’s’ student life was post-perestoika with the backlash of political mass mobilization. If in 1987 - 89 it was common for young men to march in street rallies and demonstrations, now the youth of Grisha’s milieu was apolitical. This apolitical attitude makes Grisha’s script very different from that of the Eternal Teenager or the Bohemian of the 1970s.

Grisha claims that studentship was the golden age for him. It is in this period that he started to write poetry and play the guitar and his musical tastes changed radically. Everything was new and inspiring in his student life, which was affiliated to the Bohemians, including his first love, his first encounter with pot and his first drinking bouts (zapoi).

Male friendship and student brotherhood are the key values of Grisha’s script. He emphasises that their company was exclusively male. Occasionally girls were allowed to join them, but, for the most part, love affairs were ‘parallel stories’ and did not overlap with male friendship. He develops the theory of student solidarity as one grounded on common values and practices. The crux of this solidarity was ‘intellectual interaction against a background of port’. ‘We smoked, we had coffee. We drank when it was cold, or when the first grass appeared in spring, or when we received our stipends. Why not celebrate it?’

Drinking practices: Grisha frames his drinking as a part of friendly intellectual discussions. The topography of student drinking in this period included a particular set of city cafes. In his drinking stories we once again see cafe ‘Saigon’ as a setting for the youth culture of the 1980s. This place was crucial for several subcultures of late Soviet society. Grisha got involved in the communication patterns of this place, which were strongly influenced by group consumption of port. The older generation of the Saigon milieu - people who had been at odds with the Soviet culture of the 1970s (such as Bohemians) - became Grisha’s point of reference. It was upon their drinking habits that Grisha modelled his own.

In Grisha’s story the following normative models of Soviet masculinity are named: the Soviet bard, Vladimir Vysotsky, and the writer, Sergei Dovlatov. The characters of their texts (novels, poems and songs) were bold, intellectual, drinking men, full of artistic humour, intellect and feelings of camaraderie. This culture presupposed the practice of intellectual discussions about philosophy, artistic creativity, etc., accompanied and inspired by a high intake of cheap Moldavian port.

Excess alcohol caused various kinds of trouble, fights and conflicts with the police. Grisha distinguishes different patterns of drinking behaviour, depending on the quality and kind of drinks consumed. He differentiates between vodka and dry red wine. In his estimation ‘I behave awfully on vodka. I get silly, obstinate and start to turn into a different person, whom I don’t know’. He says that when he wants to change his lifestyle, he will drink dry red wine only.

Justification and motivation for drinking: Grisha’s drinking has numerous meanings and most of them are assessed positively. He does not see his excessive drinking as self-destructive. His drinking stories are presented as the fairytale adventures of a growing man.

In his version drinking is seen as a resource of intellectual and communicative liberation and creative work. He says, ‘Drinking is necessary, because a person might be reticent, but give him a glass of something and we can strike up a conversation and everything is OK’. For him drugs and alcohol are means of intensifying sensitivity and creativity.

Grisha also appreciates the altered state of mind that comes with heavy drinking: ‘... it is interesting to be different. Because everything becomes different - different thoughts, movements, view, perspective... Reality is transformed...It is the same with drugs...’ He also believes that drinking helps him to escape from the mundane realities of Russian everyday life, which he hates. This argument gives drinking the meaning of protest against absurdity of being.

Another justification is the simple sense of relaxation that alcohol induces. ‘Alcohol has one great advantage over other drugs, I believe: it relaxes your muscles…’

We see two major frames of Grisha’s drinking script. One is his concept of masculinity, and the other is his concept of studentship as part of the lifecycle.

He sees heavy drinking as a result of the breakdown of traditional archaic masculinity.

‘…man is a hunter, who has always been engaged in an active search. It was the men who killed the animals, …women were not warriors, men were. This was normal”. Modern-day life is detrimental to these patterns. There are no overt ways to respond to the offender, there are no duels, the law prohibits street fights even if they are fair. The result is ‘the increase in the number of alcohol related crimes in our society: there is no way to sublimate...’

This crisis of primordial masculinity with its justification of force (rights of force) is seen by Grisha to be a major condition for obsessive drinking.

The second frame of his drinking script is his understanding of studentship and youth as a period when drinking is normal but temporary. Grisha believes that in the future he will be able to change his heavy drinking and moderate his drinking patterns

What prevents Grisha from drinking heavily? In spite of being convinced of the positive aspects of alcohol consumption, Grisha feels that heavy drinking can be destructive and should be controlled. He recollects several negative consequences of his drinking: ‘I started to forget things and lost all sense of time; sometimes I was late for appointments, sometimes I never turned up at all... But finally I started to get really seriously in to music, so I no longer had time for this’. Excessive drinking in this passage is seen as an obstacle to professionalism, upward mobility and efficient communication.

Finally, Grisha came to the conclusion that he had to start a new life and come to terms with the new conditions. These are the rules of the game, typical for the grown up person. ‘Before,’ he claims, ‘I did not take life seriously. I did not think about earning money. We just liked to fly above all this...’

Escape from drinking is seen as the outcome of the crucial changes in his life. When student life is eventually over, the drinking will cease. He will become an adult. The thought of work and typical adult responsibilities makes him reassess his drinking. However, he only wants to control his drinking rather than quitting entirely.

‘... I don’t want to reject drinking in principle, but neither do I want to be obsessed by it,’ he says.

Resume: Two major frames of Grisha’s drinking script are his concept of masculinity and of studentship as a period within the lifecycle. This is why, in his story, he focuses mainly on the positive aspects of drinking. His main concern is to make this habitual male practice a regulated one.

Grisha connects drinking with student life, creative work and male friendship. For him, drinking is an inevitable part of male friendship and one of the habits that accompanies other activities, such as intellectual discussion, playing music, etc. He sees excessive drinking as unregulated normal drinking, promoted by the social conditions that he calls ‘crazy’. We have called Grisha’s script ‘Student’, because he often argues that adult (not student life) will stop his drinking practices, typical for a young, single, intellectual and creative individual.

Our research shows that heavy drinking is firmly rooted in the Russian understanding of masculinity, as is well illustrated by the biographical narratives of male heavy drinkers. A certain kind of modestly destructive mischief has been a key emblem of Russian masculinity in broad distribution of Russian talk (Ries 1997). Summarising the results of our research, we can state several conclusions.

First, we identified six scripts of heavy drinking. Each script can be described as a specific physiognomy determined by a configuration of contexts conducive for drinking and a cluster of meanings ascribed to drinking by the narrator.

The six scripts of heavy drinking (the list is open) are as follows: Soviet Bohemian, Eternal Teenager, Student, Manual Worker, Komandor, Soviet Film Studio Employee. The meanings of drinking are reconstructed from the life-stories. We have pointed out the following reasons for drinking: celebration of masculinity, celebration of male friendship, the protest drinking of the Bohemian, student leisure drinking, crisis drinking, professional milieu drinking, drinking among the lower circles of the working class. Some scripts include several reasons at a time, others have one clearly prevailing reason.

Research has made it possible to identify the social contexts that are conducive to the following specific features of Russian drinking: drunken bouts, group drinking in the work place, large amounts of drinking at any one sitting, drinking of low quality, fortified liquors.

The contexts conducive to destructive heavy drinking are the teenage milieus of the suburban dormitory; student milieus; professional milieus of the Soviet time; the working class milieu, and the context of the post-Soviet masculinity crisis. Research showed that most men start drinking when they are still teenagers. Quite often they follow the patterns of drinking maintained by their fathers. In many cases the first group drinking experiences of teenagers occurred in ‘uncomfortable’ conditions - on staircases, in public toilets, and in backyards. Drinking debuts mainly involve low quality drinks. Often teenage drinking experiences are combined with solidarity fights, celebrations of male friendships, etc.

Male student life in all the cases is also accompanied by heavy drinking within a group. However this kind of drinking mainly has unserious, positive meanings and is seen as a temporary practice that is particular to this stage in the life cycle.

Heavy drinking in the Soviet era was the resort of people who could not realise their full potential within the strict boundaries for upward social mobility. Many of these individuals became Bohemians because of the Soviet conditions; drinking was a strategy for escapist protest against the regime. Drinking is seen as part of the lower-working class lifestyle. The post-Soviet crisis of masculinity provides a major frame for the contemporary reinforcement of drinking in those cases when men feel deprived of their former social positions.

Research shows that drinking is one of the major practices of masculinity. It is a group activity that accompanies communication. The structure of Soviet leisure, characterised largely by visiting friends and relatives, was also conducive to the specific drinking patterns that we found in the life-stories. Failed masculinity or a crisis of masculinity is a major justification frame for self-destructive heavy drinking and alcoholism amongst Russian men. In the biographical interviews, as well as in public discourse, the crisis of masculinity is considered an important feature of the gender relations in Soviet society. ‘Crisis of masculinity’ is the catch phrase that embraces the unprivileged deprived position of Russian men in relation to several normative models. The public discussion on the crisis of masculinity began in Russia at the end of the 1960s. The thesis about the disappearance of true manhood with its corresponding responsibilities and rights was a decent way to criticise the status quo of Soviet society.

The Soviet man was seen as weak and, thus, drinking has been seen both as a drug for the failed masculinity and as compensation for it.

In the life stories, social institutions are held responsible for a man’s drinking. Male alcoholics and habitual drunkards are seen as the victims of largely unfair circumstances. In public discourse the same explanations for drinking can be found, but responsibility for alcoholism is also attributed to the individual himself.

Our research has also shown that the boundary between the habitual practices of alcohol consumption and the hard-drinking and alcoholism is unsteady and hard to identify. In a society where the masculinity culture engenders the stereotype of regular group consumption of large quantities of alcoholic beverages, the transition from drinking as celebration to crisis drinking can be provoked by any circumstance which may be interpreted as psychologically stressful.

In contemporary Russian society we observe instances of the normalisation of previously heavy drunkards, the appearance of the AA society, and the emergence of new drinking habits within new contexts.

The changes in heavy drinking can thus be seen as changes in drinking practices and the relevant contexts: access to better quality beverages, better conditions in public drinking establishments, control of drinking in the work place, including improved incentives to work and general economic growth, which provides better paid jobs. The change in the practice of alcohol consumption can also be related to the destruction of parental stereotypes, when a father’s drinking habits are no longer perpetuated by his son.

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