From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 8/29/2005 7:17 AM

The Sin of Sins
by Irina Sandul
24 August 2005

Empathy for the plight of women alcoholics in Russia is rising far more slowly than their numbers.

MOSCOW, Russia | Masha, a long-legged former journalist, died last year at the age of 30. For seven years Masha never left her Moscow home without a bottle of vodka. “This is always with me,” she used to say, pulling a small bottle of Russkaya from the pocket of her miniskirt. Her day used to start with a deciliter of vodka, watching television and brooding about where to have another drink. Before turning to vodka Masha did heroin. “Drinking is better,” she used to say. Not long after, Masha died after overdosing on heroin.

A 50-year-old accountant, Larisa, hasn't taken a drink for two years. Sitting in a cheerless Alcoholics Anonymous meeting room at a suburban Moscow police station, she recollects how her mother also drank hard. Larisa took her first drink at 10. By the time she turned 30, two bottles of dry white wine were her daily norm.

From corporate boardrooms to village shops, women in Russia are drinking more. Many therapists and observers of Russian society concur that women are falling into the gap between obsolete beliefs about their place in society and the economic realities of Russia today, and often meeting little sympathy from partners or public opinion.

A HARD-DRINKING GENERATION

Official statistics show that women are becoming problem drinkers more quickly than men, but the figures drastically understate the actual numbers of women affected. In 2003 there were 401,233 women alcoholics, according to the Russian Health Ministry – a fifth of all alcoholics. But these figures reflect only those alcoholics registered at state psycho-neurological clinics. The real figures are several times higher. With the number of male alcoholics remaining more or less stable since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the face of Russian alcoholism is acquiring more and more womanly features. If there was one woman alcoholic for every 10 men in the early 1990s, it is generally believed that the proportion now is probably closer to six in 10.

Why are growing numbers of Russian women drinking? The founder of a private drug and alcohol treatment center in Moscow, Yakov Marshak, says the "satisfaction deficit syndrome" is the root cause. Compared to people in the West, he says, Russians are far less satisfied with the reality of their daily lives and more prone to negative thinking. He says that women alcoholics are no more difficult to cure than men, contrary to popular wisdom among Russians. A fifth of his patients are women, perhaps drawn to his clinic by a heavy dose of TV commercials featuring his gleaming face.

And yet many experts are not overly concerned with the statistics on women alcoholics. The figures simply reflect women’s desire to talk more openly about their problems, they argue.

“Women have started consulting specialists more often. They have passed a certain psychological barrier,” says the co-owner of another private alcoholism clinic, Alexei Magalif. If his women clients did begin drinking more, he suggests, it has to do with their changing role in society since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

GENESIS OF A CALAMITY

Fifteen years ago Russian women were quicker to adjust to the new economic environment than men. As incomes fell and state enterprises began to go belly-up, women saw a window of opportunity in Russia’s fast-growing small businesses. They would travel abroad, often to Poland or China, and buy up goods for resale back home. Many women were also ahead of men in picking up computer skills and a smattering of English, abilities that became almost obligatory for the would-be middle classes once foreign investment started flowing into Russia.

Many women in this relatively privileged sector now have their own businesses or managerial positions in Russian and Western corporations and provide for their families. But for many women the workload has grown unbearable. “Successful women started drinking,” says Galina Makarova, who heads the Moscow Consulting Institute of the Professional Psychotherapeutic League. "The dregs of society have always drunk. Middle-class women who are becoming socially successful have started drinking. They compete with men and have adopted a male style of relaxation.” But Russia’s traditionally patriarchal society does not consider men and women equal players. In Russia, “Nobody thinks that for a man, being an alcoholic is a shame. It even flatters him. But for a woman to admit that she is an alcoholic means confessing to the sin of sins,” says Mikhail Tarusin, an analyst with the ROMIR public opinion research agency in Moscow.

In smaller towns and villages the situation is different and often dire, Tarusin says.

Polina lives in a village in the Kaluga region, an hour's drive from Moscow. Here, as in thousands of other rural communities where the collapse of the collective farms sent many into a long downward spiral of joblessness and poverty, some women began catering to the needs of drinkers with plenty of time and little money on their hands. A couple of villagers are usually waiting outside Polina's rickety house to stock up on her moonshine vodka. Today, it's a middle-aged woman and a dead-drunk old man in a cocked ushanka hat.

“Women often start drinking to keep their husbands company, thinking this way the men will drink less,” Tarusin says. “This is domestic alcoholism.”

Polina discreetly slips a half-liter bottle into the waiting woman's plastic shopping bag. Her illegal moonshine, or samogon, sells for 30 rubles ($1) a bottle, half the price of commercial vodka from the village shop. Sometimes she sells on credit. “One person here takes credit and pays me back with his whole pension of 1,000 rubles when it comes,” the red-faced entrepreneur says.

In towns, many women put in long hours at outdoor palatkas (stalls) proffering everything from shoe polish or flowers to blinis and hot dogs, and often turn to alcohol to keep out the winter cold.

WHO WILL PROTECT THE SAVIORS?

Women in Russia, especially the better-off, are going through an identity crisis, Makarova says. Once they had thrown off the old customary role of helpmate, they found themselves not knowing which way to turn. Young, ambitious, single women too often ran up against a dead end no matter which path they took.

“The old behavior patterns classified such women as unsuccessful: ‘You are a freak,’ ” Makarova says. No wonder many became hard drinkers. “A woman should have an understanding that she has a wide choice of opportunities: to have children or not to have them, to marry or not, to have a family or to be in business. Then a woman could feel that she is normal and can make her own choice. Now, she rushes about from this to that."

The notion that Russian men can't abide their women "rushing about" is widespread, among the intelligentsia and the general public alike. Few men will tolerate an alcoholic wife or partner and they hardly ever try to help them get over it. That kind of behavior is deeply rooted in Russia's rigidly patriarchal, authoritarian family life, Makarova says. "Even in Russian fairy tales, the woman is always a symbol of the Motherland, the savior. All images of being saved are associated with women. Men can fight for a woman as a prize but to save her – never.”

In fairy tales men may often fight for a woman, but in real life they often beat their women, and this may also send women to seek consolation in the bottle. About 14,000 Russian women die at the hands of husbands or relatives each year, reports Anna, a non-profit organization that assists women in crisis. But the actual number of women who have experienced domestic violence is far more – every fourth woman, by some estimates. In the past, domestic violence was considered private family business, and kept under wraps. Today, that is beginning to change, thanks in part to the efforts of the nascent women's movement, but there are still only a tiny handful of women's crisis centers in all of Russia.

Not everyone agrees that Russian men scorn the notion of giving their wives moral support. One man, an entrepreneur in his late 30s from near Moscow who requested anonymity, is one of the exceptions. His wife has sought treatment for her drinking problem twice already in the three years since they married. Rejecting Makarova's arguments and the anecdotal evidence gathered from women's treatment centers, he says plenty of men struggle to help their sick wives. “Of course it is tiresome when she has fits of hard drinking. She fusses around and doesn't give you a chance to relax," he says. "But I can’t leave her in trouble. Her psyche is fragile."

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