> 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.
A friend of mine co-translated a very funny novel from the Russian, about playing the horses in Moscow, drinking, and hard currency. One of the drinking scenes involves a couple of people going in on a bottle of vodka, which they take to the park to surreptitiously split and drink. The implication was that you had a difficult time having a drink.
It wasn't a Bukowskiesque novel--the tone was fairly light--I enjoyed it a great deal.