Alcoholism

ALCOHOLISM

Swedish researcher Magnus Huss first used the term "alcoholism" in 1849 to describe a variety of physical symptoms associated with drunkenness. By the 1860s, Russian medical experts built on Huss's theories, relying on models of alcoholism developed in French and German universities to conduct laboratory studies on the effects of alcohol on the body and mind. They adopted the term "alcoholism" (alkogolizm ) as opposed to "drunkenness" (pyanstvo ) to connote the phenomenon of disease, and determined that it mainly afflicted the lower classes.

In 1896, at the urging of the Swiss-born physician and temperance advocate E. F. Erisman, the Twelfth International Congress of Physicians in Moscow established a special division on alcoholism as a medical problem. Within a year the Kazan Temperance Society established the first hospital for alcoholics in Kazan. In 1897, physician and temperance advocate A. M. Korovin founded a private hospital for alcoholics in Moscow, and in 1898 the Trusteeships of Popular Temperance opened an outpatient clinic.

That same year, growing public concern over alcoholism led to the creation of the Special Commission on Alcoholism and the Means for Combating It. Headed by psychiatrist N. M. Nizhegorodtsev, the ninety-five members of the commission included physicians, psychiatrists, temperance advocates, academics, civil servants, a few clergy, and two government representatives. Classifying alcoholism as a mental illness, members of the commission blamed widespread alcoholism on the tsarist government, which relied heavily on liquor revenues and refused to improve the socioeconomic conditions of the lower classes.

Although they accepted the definition of alcoholism as a disease, professionals could not agree on exactly what it was, what caused it, or how to cure it. These were topics of heated debate, and they could not be seriously discussed without critical analysis of the government's social and economic policies. Hence, the range of opinions expressed in professional discourse over alcoholism reflected the fragmentation of middle-class ideologies near the end of the imperial period: the abstract civic values of liberalism and modernization as borrowed from the West; a powerful and persistent model of custodial statehood; and a pervasive culture of collectivism.

With the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, definitions of alcoholism changed. Seeking Marxist interpretations for most social ills, Soviet health practitioners defined alcoholism as a petit bourgeois phenomenon, a holdover from the tsarist past. Working from the premise that illness could only be understood in its social context, they determined that alcoholism was a social disease influenced by factors such as illiteracy, poverty, and poor living conditions. In 1926 the director of the State Institute for Social Hygiene, A. V. Molkov, opened a department, headed by E. I. Deichman, for the sole purpose of studying alcoholism as a social disease. Within four years, however, the department was closed and the institute disbanded. By placing blame for alcoholism on social causes, Molkov, Deichman, and others were, in effect, criticizing the state's social policies—a dangerous position in the Stalinist 1930s.

In 1933 Josef Stalin announced that success was being achieved in the construction of socialism in the USSR; therefore, it was no longer plagued by petit bourgeois problems such as alcoholism. For the next fifty-two years, alcoholism did not officially exist in the Soviet Union. Consequently, all public discussion of alcoholism ended until 1985, when Mikhail S. Gorbachev launched a nationwide but ill-fated temperance campaign.

See also: alcohol monopoly; vodka

bibliography

Herlihy, Patricia. (2002). The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Segal, Boris. (1987). Russian Drinking: Use and Abuse of Alcohol in Prerevolutionary Russia. New Brunswick, NJ: Publications Division, Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies.

Segal, Boris. (1990). The Drunken Society: Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in the Soviet Union, a Comparative Study. New York: Hippocrene Books.

White, Stephan. (1996). Russia Goes Dry: Alcohol, State, and Society. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kate Transchel