Most news on Russia’s heavily controlled television, the media of choice for most Russians, is international, not domestic. But when the Vladimir Putin of the reports from Aleppo or Tokyo is offered to the audience, Russians see him as some distant international entity whose actions have little to do with anything happening in their own lives.
Back here, it is outright scary. The latest horror is a mass poisoning in the Siberian city Irkutsk. This month 71 people were reported dead after drinking hawthorn berry tincture made with alcohol. The liquid, sold as scented bath soap, was marked “not for ingestion,” but people bought it for that purpose because it was cheap — 70 rubles ($1) a bottle. One shipment proved deadly because the alcohol in it was methanol, not the customary ethanol.
Similar liquids are sold and commonly used as booze by destitute alcoholics throughout recession-ridden Russia, where even people with average incomes hoard cash and switch to cheaper goods during hard times. The cheapest legitimate vodka commands the controlled price of 190 rubles, or $3, in grocery stores; the alcoholics at the bottom of the income chain cannot afford even counterfeit vodka, which sells at about 100 rubles ($1.60) a bottle. The Russian Research Center of Federal and Regional Markets for Alcohol estimates that about 10 to 12 million people fit that description.
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