MOSCOW, March 18 (Reuters) - "Drink is the joy of Russians!" Prince Vladimir is said to have cried in the 10th century when he rejected teetotal Islam as a national religion for Russia.
The Russian Orthodox Church later canonised him.
Russia is still paying the price for his choice, with recent estimates calculating that one in every seven Russians is an alcoholic. Male life expectancy has sunk to under 60.
But in a cramped two-room Moscow apartment, a handful of temperance activists is still fighting to keep Russia sober.
"People are dying. This country is dying," said Oleg Novikov of the All-Russian Society for Temperance and Health.
The government, even under health-conscious President Vladimir Putin, has steered clear of any policies that would smack of hugely unpopular anti-alcohol campaigns.
"Drunkenness is just the tip of the iceberg. Many, many more problems come with it -- abandoned children, domestic violence," said Novikov, who heads the Society's health programmes.
According to Nikolai Gerasimenko, head of a parliamentary committee on health and sport, Russians drink some 15 litres of pure alcohol a year. Germans drink nine.
Alcohol is readily available at kiosks dotting Moscow streets, many open around the clock, with litres of vodka costing the equivalent of just over $1. Commuters often clutch bottles of beer as they make their way into work in the morning.
"We are at more than double the "civilised" norm," Gerasimenko wrote in a recent newspaper article. "According to the World Health Organisation, if the level is above eight litres then it is already dangerous for the nation."
HATED ANTI-ALCOHOL DRIVE
The All-Russian Society for Temperance and Health, founded during Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's reviled anti-alcohol campaign in the mid-1980s, once counted its members in millions. Local branches were given lavish offices in Russia's provinces.
Every worker was forced to join the movement in a campaign which saw officials rip up vineyards in now ex-Soviet Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine and slash vodka production.
"Generals, the highest-ranking people in the Communist Party joined. Even the police, though of course they were secretly still drinking," said Novikov, a psychiatrist.
Vladimir Yarigin, a factory worker twice decorated as a Hero of Socialist Labour, was chosen to head the organisation.
Now, only a handful of dedicated and unpaid volunteers keep the society afloat. Its Moscow offices, which once occupied the entire floor of a well-appointed building, have since moved to two rooms with peeling wallpaper at the back of a block rented out by travel agents.
"They stopped paying us and started laughing at us instead," Novikov said.
Yarigin, now 67, spends one morning a week at the Society's offices, in his time off from the plant where he still works. All other government-sponsored officials have long left.
The final blow for the Society's activities, mainly medical campaigns and information drives, came with Russian President Boris Yeltsin, famous for his love of the national drink.
"When Yeltsin came along they stopped talking about the national alcohol problem," Novikov said. "Instead, the opposition just wanted us to diagnose him as an alcoholic."
Yeltsin spent long spells in hospital during his presidency and once famously failed to get off his plane at Shannon airport, leaving the Irish president waiting on the tarmac.
SHOOTING GORBACHEV
Gorbachev's anti-alcohol policies were among the greatest failures of the perestroika period and remain one of the reasons for his lasting unpopularity in Russia.
The campaign, which lasted less than two years, sank public finances heavily dependent on alcohol excise taxes and fuelled widespread discontent. Sugar, an essential ingredient for samogon or Russian moonshine, disappeared from market stalls.
The director of Ukraine's Magarach Wine-Making Institute in Crimea hanged himself rather than carry out the Kremlin's directives to destroy his ancient vines.
Jokes about Gorbachev's policies abounded.
In one, a man queued for vodka for several hours before, exasperated, deciding it would be easier to shoot Gorbachev. He marched off to the Kremlin, but returned minutes later. The queue to shoot Gorbachev, he complained, was even longer.
But during the brief campaign Russia's life expectancy rose for the first time since the 1960s -- to 65.
That figure has since plummeted. Now, according to official statistics, male life expectancy is below 59.
Alcohol-related deaths, many fuelled by financial despair, reach into the tens of thousands every year.
"In Russia, the government always prefers to let people drink rather than have a revolution," said Konstantin, a volunteer adviser at Alcoholics Anonymous. "Each time we have prohibition, we have social upheaval -- under the Tsar, under Gorbachev."
But while the funds have dried up, Russian sobriety campaigners still have work to do.
"The main problem is the lack of information," Konstantin said. "Official medicine ignores the problem and there are too many people proposing quack cures. I always ask, if you can cure it, where is your Nobel prize?"
Yarigin says the organisation would need only a tiny fraction of government revenues from alcohol -- no longer as high as they were under the Soviet period, when there was a government monopoly on alcohol sales.
"Now, we ask only for one percent of their alcohol revenues to fund an awareness campaign," Yarigin said.
But, activists say, the government is not forthcoming.
"They cannot close us down. That would be an embarrassment, Novikov said. "But if we shut down tomorrow, no one would care."