What's it like in Poland?
I don't know if this is true, but I have deduced tentatively that the reason why alcoholism was much less of a problem in the Soviet era is simply that alcohol was harder to get. You can get wasted today in Russia for $1 if you're willing to drink the samogon (rotgut).
[WS:] Not really - the samogon has always been popular. E European societies were, for the most part, peasant societies where heavy drinking was the way of life since the middle ages - in a substantial part because landowners often paid peasant serfs in alcohol rather than money. Alcoholism was a serious problem, but pretty much invisible due to the fact that it has always been a part of the popular culture which the official culture tolerated but did not pay too much attention to it. I think that given the sheer volume of alcohol consumed - most of it the form of hard liquor: vodka, samogon or grain alcohol (180 proof) - the alcoholism rates remained relatively low.
This was partly a result of perceptions - what would be considered a serious "drinking problem, in say the US was seen as benign indiscretion in E. Europe. However, the other side of it was that this was dealt with by mainly informal means, basically outside the official institutions. The anti-alcohol and anti-drug organizations started to appear only in the late 1960s and 1970s in Poland.
I think things started going down the drain in the 1980s with the dissolution of many social institutions due to larger political and economic changes that took place in E. Europe. Many drunks, who used to be treaded as a kind of "sacred cows" by their families and employers, became social nuisance and sacked, kicked out of their apartments, or even abandoned by their families - which only contributed to the problem. I recall, for example, that my father who was the chief of operations of one of the shipyards was often petitioned by the wives of employees sacked for being drunk on the job to rehire them. He usually did after making arrangement that the wife would directly receive the husband's pay. The logic behind that decision was that sacking the guy would hurt mainly the family he supported and it would encourage him to drink even more. That attitude of benign tolerance started to change in the late 1980s and 1990s and today drunks are the outcasts - unemployed, unemployable and homeless. There are some regional variations (eastern part still being more tolerant), but generally it is a very different world out there.
Wojtek