Not much new here. Alcoholism has been a major cause of death for Russian men for many decades. During WW2, the Red Army suffered a lot of casualties from its soldiers drinking anything they found that they thought was booze. The Germans used large quantities of wood alcohol (for antifreeze, etc.)and a lot of it went down Russian throats.
I remember reading a story back in the early ‘80’s about a Soviet military base in Afghanistan. They flew fighter-bombers out of that base.
The story was written by an eyewitness, who reported that the smell of jet fuel was powerful everywhere on the base, and even some distance outside it’s perimeter. When he asked his escort about this, it was explained in this way: the bombers used ethyl alcohol (for cooling, I presume), in the ratio of one ton of alchohol for every 12 tons of fuel. Therefore, for every kilo of alcohol consumed for purposes other than flying, 12 kilos of fuel had to be made to disappear from base supplies.
For this reason, he wrote, large areas of the base were essentially kerosene swamps.
7 decades of communism does strange things to people
(Cue Raiders of the Lost Ark scene of Karen Allen downing shots against that fat Tibetan guy)