Last man sitting unity6/25/2023 The homily is accompanied by an exemplum: an account of the life of Father Dmitry Dudko, a remarkable evangelising Orthodox priest of the 1960s and 1970s. "Life expectancy," he observes, "spiked upwards again in the 1980s when Mikhail Gorbachev severely restricted access to alcohol." This ignores the torrents of brochures on the evils caused by the "green snake" of alcoholism that had poured from Soviet presses, mass-market and specialist, since the late 1960s (admittedly with little appreciable effect), and also the fact that Soviet-era statistics were likely not so much to reflect the actual results of high-profile campaigns as indicate the results they were supposed to have.įortunately, treating readers to a sermon on Russia's dysfunctionality is only part of what Bullough has in mind. Bullough appears to believe that, of all Russia's leaders, only Gorbachev was seriously interested in combatting alcoholism. Even as an account of compulsive drinking, the book has its blind spots. There are many accounts of modern Russian society – by Geoffrey Hosking, Caroline Humphrey and Alena Ledeneva, among others (none of them mentioned by Bullough) – that address the problems of anomie and lack of trust in a less melodramatic and more sophisticated way. If The Last Man in Russia were only a philippic in this style, it would hardly merit further attention. "The Russian nation is shrivelling away from within," Bullough claims. But the prosperous capital cannot salvage the country from the spiritual malaise that makes people drink. Only Moscow, boom-time city, "sucking up" resources from all over the country, offsets the general picture. He blames drink for the demographic and psychological collapse of the Russian nation, for the empty and rotting settlements that scatter the country, the catastrophic rates of accidental death, and the dismal record of life expectancy and infant mortality. As Richard Turbervile put it in 1568, "Drinke is their whole desire, the pot is all their pride, / The sobrest head doth once a day stand needfull of a guide." Oliver Bullough's The Last Man in Russia gives the old moral expostulations a modern twist. T hat the Russians are "giuen much to drunkenesse" has been a cliche of western accounts of their country since the early modern era.
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