In Russia, rates of alcohol consumption and homicide are among the highest in the world, and already-high levels increased dramatically after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Rates of both, however, vary greatly among Russia’s 89 regions.(http://saccsivdotcom.wordpress.com/2013/04/28/a-violent-russia-2/)
We took advantage of newly available vital statistics and socioeconomic data to examine the regional covariation of drinking and lethal violence. Log-log models were employed to estimate the impact of alcohol consumption on regional homicide rates, controlling for structural factors thought to influence the spatial distribution of homicide rates. Results revealed a positive and significant relationship between alcohol consumption and homicide, with a 1% increase in regional consumption of alcohol associated with an approximately 0.25% increase in homicide rates.In Russia, higher regional rates of alcohol consumption are associated with higher rates of homicide.We examined the covariation of aggregate alcohol consumption and rates of homicide in Russia. Rates of both alcohol consumption and lethal violence in the country are among the highest in the world. Although the social, political, and economic changes of the 1990s led to increased rates of alcohol consumption in Russia, a high level of alcohol use has been a perennial problem in the country. The same is true of violence: already-high homicide rates were exacerbated by the shocks of the 1990s.1
Many scholars agree that the Russian public health crisis of the 1990s was due largely to the massive social and economic changes in the country.2 Figure 1 shows the annual rates of alcohol use and homicide from 1965 to 1996. These statistics demonstrate similar trends during this time. Furthermore, alcohol-related deaths and deaths from external causes (including violence) were the leading causes of the fluctuation of mortality rates in Russia during the 1990s.3 It is generally accepted in the literature that policy and structural factors are partially responsible for the changing rates of alcohol consumption in Russia and that these changes have likely had an impact on overall and violent mortality rates.2,4–6.
Aside from this temporal perspective, there may also be a cross-sectional component to the relationship. That is, although levels of both alcohol consumption and homicides rose after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the increase was not uniform in either case, and there is tremendous variation throughout the nation.1,7 Furthermore, Walberg et al.6 showed that higher levels of alcohol consumption in a region are associated with a decline in life expectancy. McKee8(p824) argued that “collectively, this evidence suggests the importance of alcohol in explaining the Russian mortality crisis,” and the main hypothesis we tested is that regional variation in the level of aggregate alcohol consumption is also important in explaining the regional differences in homicide.
WHAT, HOW, AND WHERE RUSSIANS DRINK.
The following review of the theoretical and empirical literature outlines the potential reasons for expecting a relationship between alcohol consumption and homicide rates. A few prominent Russia-specific cultural issues, however, deserve brief attention here. Some researchers have suggested that it is the nature of alcohol consumption in Russia—a large proportion of alcohol is consumed in the form of distilled spirits (mainly vodka) and drunk in binges,7,8 often in unregulated settings—that is responsible for alcohol’s unique impact on the incidence of various types of alcoholrelated mortality (e.g., alcohol poisoning) and violence.
Binge drinking is defined as consuming 5 drinks in a single sitting for men (4 for women) or 80 g (roughly 6 standard US drinks) of ethanol at 1 sitting.9,10 Survey data from Bobak et al.7 reveal that nearly one third of Russian males drink at least a quarter liter of vodka (which contains 78.5 g of ethanol) at 1 sitting at least once per month. This pattern of heavy episodic drinking, together with the consumption of distilled spirits that result in faster and stronger intoxication and have been shown to be related to homicide elsewhere,11 likely influences self-control in potentially violent situations.
Aside from the loss of self-control, the lack of direct formal and informal social control may play a role as well. In Russia, drinking in public places is common and likely becoming more so with the privatization of alcohol outlets and alcohol production and distribution. However, the most common situation is drinking together with family, friends, and/or acquaintances in the home or some other private or semiprivate setting. Regulation by police officers, bar bouncers, other security personnel, or even passersby on the street is thus lacking, thereby potentially allowing low-level arguments to escalate into violent situations. Thus the potential disinhibition due to the binge drinking of vodka may be magnified by limited social control because of the unregulated setting in which drinking most often occurs, thereby creating situations that increase the risk of violence.
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LITERATURE REVIEW.
Alcohol Consumption During the Political-Economic Transition of the 1990s
The disintegration of the Soviet Union led to large-scale political, economic, and social transformation. Along with these sweeping social changes came a public health crisis, including sharp increases in rates of alcohol consumption and lethal violence.
Direct measures of alcohol consumption during this period are difficult to estimate, especially because the anti-alcohol campaign during the mid- to late 1980s led to increased production of homemade alcohol and thus higher rates of unregistered consumption. Regardless of the proxy employed, however, there appears to be widespread agreement that alcohol consumption rose sharply after the anti-alcohol campaign ceased, peaked in 1993 or 1994, and then declined slightly during the late 1990s (Figure 1 ).
The Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, for example, shows self-reported daily alcohol usage increasing in the early 1990s and then decreasing from 1994 to 1998.12 These self-reports are accompanied by similar changes in the rate of deaths due to alcohol poisoning.13 Furthermore, although Treml14 has disputed earlier claims of the success of the anti-alcohol campaign provided by Nemtsov,15 both his estimates for the 1990s and those of Nemtsov are generally consistent with the rise and fall described here, even though the 2 researchers used unrelated measures. Treml, for example, used various sources of official data (including those related to sugar usage, assumed to be employed to produce homemade vodka) to estimate the total (i.e., recorded plus unrecorded) consumption of alcohol, whereas Nemtsov used measures of alcohol-related harm (i.e., blood alcohol–positive accidental and violent death rates) to estimate levels of consumption. Outside Russia, other scholars have also used indicators of harm and/or mortality as a way to estimate unrecorded alcohol consumption.16
Crime data reveal patterns similar to those of alcohol, with juvenile arrests for alcohol consumption and public intoxication, for example, increasing during the early 1990s and the percentage of juvenile arrestees who were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the crime rising from around 17% in 1991 to about 27% in 1994.17,18 Furthermore, crime data reveal that of the 24 350 persons arrested for homicide in Russia in 1995, nearly 75% were under the influence of alcohol.19 The convergence of estimates from several scholars using different methods provides increased confidence that there were indeed major changes in the levels of alcohol consumption during this period and that there is considerable variation throughout the vast nation in aggregate levels of alcohol intake.
Leon and Shkolnikov4 argued that alcohol played a major role in the Russian mortality crisis during the 1990s. The general category “external causes of death” was a leading contributor to excess mortality during this period. These external causes comprised mostly alcohol-related incidents, accidental injuries, and violence-related injuries.20 Those age groups (i.e., working-age males) and causes of death (i.e., alcohol and external causes) that showed the most appreciable benefits during the anti-alcohol campaign are the same groups and causes that were hardest hit during the political-economic transition of the early 1990s.4 The mortality decline from 1995 to 1998 was also due largely to a reduction in these same types of death.13 Furthermore, injuries and violence were the largest contributors to the decrease in male life expectancy during the transition period.20 Overall, about 12% of the decline in life expectancy from 1990 to 1994 was due directly to alcohol-related mortality (e.g., poisonings, cirrhosis), and nearly one third of the drop was due to external causes, including homicide and suicide.21
Many regard individual and social stress resulting from the large-scale political, economic, and social changes, as well from the widespread social problems accompanying them, as the primary causes of increased alcohol consumption during the transition period.4 The formerly far-reaching Soviet social welfare system collapsed, pensions and savings lost nearly all of their value, unemployment rose, and poverty increased substantially. These problems occurred together with shifting cultural values—from a focus on state goals and interests to a focus on more individualistic needs, wishes, and responsibilities—creating anomic conditions.22 There was also a bleak outlook on the future, as well as the general stress of severe disappointment: the transition, after all, was supposed to make life better. Durkheim22 argued that under such conditions, people, especially men, tend toward self-destruction.
Seeman and Anderson23 have shown that a high level of powerlessness in individuals is significantly related to heavier drinking and to drinking problems. Given this social disruption, the bleak outlook, and the powerlessness of individuals to influence the structural characteristics creating such conditions, the rapid increase in alcohol consumption and lethal violence (including suicide) may reflect the rise in stress experienced by Russians during the transition.2,24 This is especially true for specific groups within society, and one can see this in data that indicate that the increase in mortality from alcohol-related causes was greatest among men in their 40s and 50s, a pattern that coincides with mortality peaks for homicide.1 Finally, Gavrilova et al.25 pointed out that this pattern of increase from 1991 to 1994 and then decrease from 1995 to 1998 fits the typical 2-stage stress-related pattern of acute stress and then relative recovery suggested in Braunstein and Toister.26
A constellation of supply-side factors likely enabled the rise in alcohol consumption. The state monopoly over alcohol was repealed in 1992, and this led to an increase in supply as local entrepreneurs rushed to make a profit in this lucrative business and international companies sought to open up new markets.2,27 Supply had also increased because of the availability of large amounts of illegally produced alcohol, the scale of which is often blamed on the semiprohibition of the earlier anti-alcohol campaign.4 These factors, together with inefficient tax collection on the part of the Russian government, helped to keep the price of alcohol much lower than that of other goods, and between 1989 and 1994 the price of alcohol rose at only one fifth the rate of food prices.2
The patterns of alcohol consumption and violence in Russia might also be linked in other ways. For example, in their study of 1 Russian city (Taganrog), Carlson and Vågerö28 found that regardless of household income, heavy drinking was significantly higher among those men most likely to have suffered economic and status loss during the transition (e.g., those with a lower education and/or those with a manual occupation). These authors also found that the heavy drinkers in their study had a frequency of family conflicts and quarrels 6 times higher than that of the non–heavy drinkers. This is important, because Chenet et al.29 showed that marriage among Russians is a protective factor against alcohol-related death and because Stack and Bankowski30 found that single and divorced men have a higher relative risk of drinking compared with married men. In other words, married men who are heavy drinkers are likely to find themselves in situations that lead to divorce, and being single or divorced raises the risk of even heavier drinking.
Another potential outcome among married men who drink heavily, however, is domestic violence. Thus far in Russia, there is little work on relationship violence, but preliminary research suggests that rates are more than twice as high in Russia as in the United States, which itself has a much higher rate than most other Western nations.31,32 There is also discussion of this relationship in the broader literature.33 Overall, both divorce and drinking are likely to reduce social capital (i.e., norms and social networks that encourage cooperation) among individuals and social cohesion among groups, and Kennedy and Kawachi34 have found social capital to be negatively related to mortality in Russia. Finally, social cohesion and collective efficacy (i.e., the willingness of neighbors to intervene for the common good) are also both implicated in rates of crime and lethal violence in the criminological literature.35,36(p918)
Alcohol Consumption and Lethal Violence
Previous research has suggested that alcohol consumption is related to violence, because of both individual-level physiological37 and group-level social and economic factors.38,39 Studies of both victims of violence40–43 and offenders44–46 revealed that a high percentage of both groups are under the influence of alcohol at the time of the violent event. At the aggregate level, both longitudinal47–49 and cross-sectional research50 presented evidence of a correlation between alcohol and homicide. Pernanen,51–53 Parker,50,54 and Parker and Rebhun49 detailed potential conceptual frameworks and theoretical pathways of the relationship between alcohol and violence.
In Russia there is strong evidence for a positive relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality, especially from external causes,55 including homicide.56 Yet although the Russian public health and mortality crisis have received considerable scholarly attention,57–62 very little empirical work has been undertaken on homicide, despite the alarming increase in and high rate of lethal violence. This is largely because of the former Soviet government’s secrecy in regard to (and even falsification of) data on alcohol,15,63 crime,64 mortality,20,65 and socioeconomics, making methodologically rigorous research on violence in the country virtually impossible until very recently.
As a result of newly available data, a few studies of homicide in Russia have begun to appear. For example, Chenet et al.29 studied the socioeconomic determinants of violent death in Moscow; Nemtsov66 examined the impact of the anti-alcohol campaign on violent mortality; Shkolnikov et al.62,67 completed extensive analyses of homicide in Udmurtia; Shapiro60 and Cornia and Paniccia59 studied the demographic impact of the political-economic transition, including the rising mortality from lethal violence; and Pridemore56 examined the impact of social structure on the spatial distribution of homicide rates in the country. The similarity in patterns of alcohol consumption and deaths from external causes, including violence, are thus focusing attention on the role of alcohol.
Table 1 lists the measures for each of the dependent and independent variables used in this analysis, together with the mean and standard deviation for each.
—Measures Used for Independent and Dependent Variables: Russia, 1995.
Homicide.
Mortality data usually provide a more accurate estimate of the total number of homicides than crime data,68,69 and this is true in Russia (unpublished data available from the author).56 Raw data on crime were unavailable during the Soviet era, and the information released by authorities was vague and unreliable. The Ministry of the Interior (MVD) was responsible for these data, and the agency had a history of corruption and was known to be a tool of the Communist party, which had an ideological stake in what was reported.70.
source:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447353/
