This study will examine the relationship between social structure, alcohol consumption, and rates of lethal violence in Russia. Though the rate of alcohol consumption in Russia was still very high compared to other nations, it declined sharply during the anti-alcohol campaign in the mid-1980s. This was followed by a dramatic increase in consumption in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia faced repeated economic crises. Further, homicide and suicide rates in Russia are also among the highest in the world and follow a similar pattern to that of alcohol consumption during this time. Many researchers partially attribute the high rate of lethal violence in Russia, as well as its rise and fall over time and its wide range of variation throughout the country, to variation in the level of alcohol consumption. Employing newly available mortality, demographic, and economic data, this study is designed to test the efficacy of these claims and to disentangle the relationship between social structure, alcohol consumption, and lethal violence in Russia by examining the following specific topics: 1. The unique measurement issues associated with alcohol-related mortality in Russia. 2. The cross-sectional relationship between social structural factors, the level of alcohol consumption, and rates of homicide and suicide mortality among Russia's 89 regions. 3. The temporal relationship between alcohol consumption and rates of lethal violence in Russia since World War II (the nation as the unit of analysis). 4. The impact of President Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign on the aggregate level of alcohol consumption and the result of this on rates of homicide and suicide. Both cross-sectional and time-series analyses will be used to examine these issues. City-, regional-, and national-level data will be employed to estimate the effects of structural forces and public policy on the aggregate level of alcohol consumption and the resulting impact on rates of homicide and suicide mortally. -The importance of the results of this project will go well beyond Russia and will hold significance to researchers in several disciplines. Alcohol policy analysts will be interested in the efficacy of the national-level anti-alcohol campaign; epidemiologists will be interested in how structural factors influence the very high levels of alcohol consumption and alcohol-related mortality in Russia, and sociologists and criminologists will be interested in how social structure and the level of alcohol consumption interact to influence homicide and suicide rates.
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