Russian Happy Hour. Photo by Kommersant
“ In America, you drink vodka.
But in Soviet Russia…vodka drinks you.”
—Yakov Smirnoff, comic genius
Russians as a species are disappearing from this planet faster than Chilean sea bass. With a mortality rate comparable only to that of African countries suffering from massive HIV epidemics, yet without a third-world birth rate to compensate, Russia has seen its population decline by seven percent since the collapse of the Soviet Union to under 143 million people. Russian men have what a recent World Bank report called “short, brutal lives.” Their life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to just 58 years, meaning they live at least 15 fewer years than Western men. If this trend continues, Russia’s population will fall to under 100 million by 2050.
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And it’s thanks in large part to alcohol. Booze is the big reason why Russians are going extinct. Of the seven million Russian deaths in the last decade, 34 percent were due to alcohol.
How does alcohol kill? In part by making Russians drunk enough to do the dirty work themselves. Russia’s murder rate is one of the highest in the world, up there with Jamaica’s. Eighty-three percent of murderers and more than 60 percent of murder victims were slobbering drunk during the deed. A typical drunken murder story goes something like this: Two middle-aged male friends meet, go back to A’s apartment, and pound four or five bottles of cheap vodka over a two-day binge. A passes out drunk; B stumbles away, rapes and strangles A’s prepubescent daughter, steals A’s microwave oven, and sets A’s apartment on fire to cover his tracks but passes out while setting the fire, then dies of smoke inhalation. (This, by the way, happened to my ex-girlfriend’s next-door neighbors.)
Then there’s good old poisoning. Last year, 40,000 Russians died of alcohol poisoning. In the U.S., with double Russia’s population, only a few hundred folks died of alcohol poisoning.
But you see, Russians love highly unconventional spirits. Through trial and error (and a lot of blindness and death), they have invented some of the most kick-ass, hair-on-your-chest-sprouting cocktails in modern history. These cocktails were largely perfected during Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed dry campaign in the late 1980s. He severely restricted alcohol production to try to sober the nation up, quickly causing a brief upturn in Russian men’s life expectancy—and just as quickly a backlash that ended his political career and brought about the reappearance of Russia’s cuddly national mascot, vodka.
But even with vodka widely available in the post-Soviet period, that doesn’t mean that Russians have forgotten their favorite homemade brews, as those 40,000 poisoning deaths prove. Here is a guide to the six most-fucking-awful Russian cocktails.
W.C. FIELDSIKOV
Shipr on the Rocks
Hairspray
Flying Restaurants
Shoe Polish
Boris Fyodorych-6
Rose Water
