Drinking toward Manhood

Abstract

Existing research extensively documents the health crisis in Russia and the former Soviet Union. In this article, the authors examine what historical factors set the stage for these trends and, perhaps more importantly, their origins. Specifically, the authors analyze Russian history, culture, and state ideology to explore the connections between masculinities and alcohol and to apply existing sociological theories of gender to this unique social context. The authors employ the concept of hegemonic masculinity to examine the historical dimensions of working-class drinking and its impact on Russian men’s health. The authors also identify one of the important origins of men’s harmful drinking practices by focusing on the historical construction and enactment of masculinities in two prominent social fields—the tavern and the workplace. The authors’ focus upon Russian history and culture emphasizes the sociohistorical factors associated with negative drinking patterns, and consequent health problems, among men in this part of the world.

Keywords

drugs and alcohol health hegemonic masculinity history sociology

Introduction

Existing research extensively documents the health crisis in Russia and the former Soviet Union (e.g., Hinote 2009; Pridemore 2006). While negative health trends in this part of the world are not new (Cockerham 1999; Merridale 2000), current conditions nonetheless constitute a major health and demographic crisis for many segments of these populations. Men’s longevity in Russia experienced an average decrease over the second half of the twentieth century, while longevity among women has for the most part hovered around seventy years. But what historical factors set the stage for these trends, and perhaps more importantly, what are their origins? Because history and the significance of the historical moment are important and often overlooked dimensions of hegemonic masculinity (R. Connell, personal communication, September 9, 2010), this article looks more deeply into Russian history, culture, and state ideology to explore the connections between masculinities and alcohol and to apply existing sociological theories of gender to these unique social contexts.

Alcohol use remains an important behavioral issue for Russian men and, in many regions of the former Soviet Union, has played a significant, if not primary, role in the general decline in life expectancy over the past half century (e.g., Andreev et al. 2008; Cockerham, Hinote, and Abbott 2006; Leon et al. 2007; Nemtsov 2005; Pridemore 2006). Men’s drinking in this part of the world has persisted for centuries (Herlihy 2002; White 1996). But more recent drinking patterns, styles, and contexts are particularly important dimensions of diminishing health and longevity among predominantly working-class men between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-four, primarily due to lifestyle-related illnesses like cardiovascular disease or from injury, accident, poisoning, suicide, or homicide (Kay 2006; Phillips 2000; Transchel 2006).

The current health crisis is also a distinctly gendered phenomenon. Several studies examine sex, gender, and health in Russia and the former Soviet Union (e.g., Abbott, Turmov, and Wallace 2006; Hinote, Cockerham, and Abbott 2009a, 2009b; Pietilä and Rykyönen 2008), but researchers often neglect themes relating to masculinities in Soviet and post-Soviet societies (Kukhterin 2000). Other research (e.g., Ashwin and Lytkina 2004; Kiblitskaya 2000a) analyzes the broader “masculinity crisis” in late Soviet and post-Soviet societies. Various theories (e.g., Connell 1987; Courtenay 2000) and analyses (e.g., Crawshaw 2007; Emslie et al. 2006; Gannon, Glover, and Abel 2004; O’Brien, Hunt, and Hart 2005; Oliffe 2005) speak to several dimensions of men’s health and masculinity, but the gendered character of health remains undertheorized. In this article, we employ the concept of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987, 1995, 1998; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) to analyze alcohol-related behaviors among working-class men in Russia, and to examine the ways that these men have historically achieved or “done” masculinity (West and Zimmerman 1987).

Gender is a key component in shaping men’s lives, and dominant ideas of masculinity influence men through negative health behaviors. More specifically, drinking patterns and practices serve to sustain and reproduce inequalities as well as the social structures that perpetuate them (e.g., Courtenay 2000; Eisler 1995; Neff, Prihoda, and Hoppe 1991; O’Neil, Good, and Holmes 1995; Pleck, Sonenstein, and Ku 1994). By articulating the ways that hegemonic masculinity has been constructed, we are specifically interested in how drinking behaviors are linked to men’s self-concepts and how hegemonic ideologies profoundly influence health and longevity. We demonstrate how drinking practices, embedded in particular social contexts, elevate and/or maintain a man’s status, and identify a prominent working-class hegemonic masculine form that has directly contributed to men’s health issues. We explore the origins of working-class drinking, because historically, being a “real workingman” was closely tied to alcohol. Accordingly, we focus upon Russian history and culture to emphasize the sociohistorical factors associated with negative drinking patterns, and consequent health problems, among men in this part of the world.

Masculinity permeates virtually all facets of social life through multiple levels of analysis—the micro- (interaction), the meso- (institutions), and the macro- (state, culture, and ideology) levels, and masculinities are also configurations of practice (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) that are fluid, dynamic, and formed through interaction. While masculinities are created through social practices, these practices are embedded within the many structural constraints of a particular culture (i.e., gender as structured action, see Messerschmidt 2000). Because we “do gender” in specific social milieus, interaction reproduces (and sometimes changes) these social structures and practices (West and Zimmerman 1987). Understanding these structures and practices and how they perpetuate themselves (and ultimately their consequences) requires examining how men’s interactions unfold within particularly important social situations.

In this article, we specifically analyze two historically prominent fields (see Bourdieu 1998, 2004)—the tavern and the workplace—in order to link culturally prescribed alcohol-related dispositions to the fluid historical construction and enactment of masculinities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before exploring these settings and processes in greater depth, we briefly review Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) reformulation of hegemonic masculinity. We then discuss the origins of drinking in Russia and then emphasize the ways that men engage in unhealthy behaviors like heavy drinking as a way of expressing idealized forms of masculinity, asserting their difference from and power over women and inferior men, and strongly affirming their allegiance to the working-class archetype.

Hegemonic Masculinity

Hegemonic masculinity is a multidimensional approach to understanding gender that permits analysis of individual interactions, social structure, and culture (Connell 1987). This concept enables us to see how gendered expectations and behaviors are historically and culturally specific and develop particular meanings based on social context (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Dellinger 2004). The original concept emerged from critiques of the male sex role, where masculinity was equated with particular role expectations or characteristics. While we focus on a specific behavior—heavy alcohol consumption—we are not taking an essentialist view of Russian men and are attentive to the critique that hegemonic masculinity often gets reduced to particular characteristics like competitiveness and aggression (Gough 2006). We use Connell and Messerschmidt’s (2005) reformulated concept to understand how Russian men’s alcohol consumption is linked to a specific cultural and historical form of hegemonic masculinity. In the following paragraphs, we offer a brief explanation of this reformulation.

Gender Hierarchy

We connect health and gender by analyzing how health-related beliefs and behaviors can be understood as a means of constructing or demonstrating gender (Courtenay 2000). Though we are focused on men’s drinking as a health issue, we also expose this practice as a way that men construct gender amid the loss of power in other domains of life (such as the family). According to Connell (1987, 75) “gender is a way of structuring social practice in general, not a special type of practice, it is unavoidably involved with other social structures.” Therefore, with our analysis we can view the enactment of gendered power through the lens of heavy drinking.

Hegemonic masculinity must be achieved through interaction within particular social settings, and in response to dynamic relations between the state and individuals. “Masculinity is not a fixed entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals. Masculinities are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action and, therefore, can differ according to the gender relations in a particular social setting” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 836). Additionally, most men do not inevitably mirror culturally idealized hegemonic ideals, but these practices are what most men are motivated to support or aspire to be (Connell 1987). This cultural ideal or expression of dominant masculinity is thus legitimized and sanctions the existing gender hierarchy as a whole (Campbell 2000).

While hegemonic practices circumscribe access to dominance, it is also important to account for the agency of subordinated groups as much as the power of dominant groups (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 848). For example, working-class men lacking institutional power nevertheless go about constructing masculinity that is relevant to their local context and in specific interactional fields, and often in response to their marginalization. Without access to traditional forms of patriarchal power, these men are attempting to claim some type of power in settings available to them. While they may actually be part of a subordinated group, we see their heavy alcohol consumption as part of their response to marginalization. Focusing on the complexity among varied masculinities illustrates how political and social changes can transform the gender order. This approach also shows how gender relations are a critical component of understanding social problems pertaining to health and mortality.

Geography of Masculinities and Social Embodiment

Hegemonic masculinities can be analyzed at the local, regional, and global levels. We focus on local, regional, and state hegemonic masculinities as a way to make visible many common practices that go unquestioned. Links exist between these various levels of masculinity, though there is not necessarily a “simple hierarchy of power or authority, running from global to regional to local” but rather interplay among them all (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 850). Regional hegemonic masculinity may represent what is largely accepted as a masculine ideal, embodied oftentimes in cultural or folk heroes like film actors or professional athletes, thus providing a framework that may be materialized in daily practices and interactions. Local masculinities, while compatible with and drawing on regional masculinities, are created through daily interaction in communities and within families and thus may vary. As we will illustrate, heavy drinking as a masculine practice is constituted through interactions with other men and women, local communities, institutions, and the state.

Furthermore, heavy drinking as a gendered social practice is intimately linked with real bodies and real consequences. Patterns of embodiment are culturally specific ways that men use their bodies. These bodily practices enforce hegemonic boundaries and are used to differentiate hegemonic and alternative masculinities. It is important to connect activities of the body to social structures and to see how these bodily practices are related to power within dominant institutions. Men actively use their bodies to embody successful masculinity through heavy drinking (Campbell 2000). Moreover, this drinking is a marker of masculine identity, which means it is one of the revered ways of being a man and thus requires “other men to position themselves in relation to it” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832). Within a given social context, particular practices are privileged and reinforce hierarchy, and we demonstrate how heavy drinking continues to be a hegemonic practice that is critical to understanding the negative health practices and outcomes among many Russian men.

In sum, in any particular time, place, and society, masculinities are constructed relative to one another. Because power is an integral component of all gender relations, masculinities (in hegemonic, subordinated, or oppositional forms) are organized in ways that reflect how some men have greater power over other men (and/or women) in specific social contexts, and these processes unfold at (and are reflected in) multiple levels of scale. For example, much of the language of Russian workingmen, and the taunts used to openly challenge the masculinity of other men in both the tavern and workplace fields, reflects the fluid enactment and construction of masculine hierarchies. Drinking practices themselves, in style and volume, also illustrate these processes at the micro-level of interaction, as do other structured practices like fighting, cursing, and ritualized feminine degradation. At the meso-level, institutions like the family sowed the seeds of working-class masculine dominance (over women but also other men), often through the use of alcohol and the repertoire of ritualized behaviors surrounding its consumption, while in the economic sphere vodka was routinely used to establish and enforce masculine hierarchies and situational dominance in the workplace (Kiblitskaya 2000a; Phillips 2000; Transchel 2006). The Russian state as a macro-level apparatus also shaped both power and gender relations (see Connell 2009). The Russian state not only pressed men and masculine expression into specific interactional and institutional settings, but it also molded gender identities through men’s ideological identification with the state as workers or soldiers.

Alcohol and the Origins of Drinking Practices in Russia

It is impossible to deny the significance of alcohol, and specifically vodka, in Russian history and culture (Phillips 2000). It is a fundamental part of social life, and the Russian penchant for alcohol is renowned (White 1996). Some of the earliest foreign visitors to the region comment on the prevalence of Russian drinking (Baron 1967; Fletcher 1966; Herlihy 2002). Alcohol was integral to virtually all domestic, religious, political, and economic rituals, and marked every important event in the lives of citizens. By the nineteenth century, vodka was the single most important item in the peasantry’s festive diet and was included in all celebrations. For the Russian peasantry at this time, friendship was no longer friendship without vodka, and happiness was no longer happiness. Vodka warmed citizens in the cold, cooled them in the summer, protected them from the damp, consoled them in grief, and cheered them when times were good (Christian 1990; Smith and Christian 1984).

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, demographic and economic changes affected not only Russia’s social and political landscape but also the character of national identity (MacKenzie and Curran 1999). Parallel developments in the cultural sphere manifested in drinking behavior. Heavy alcohol consumption occupied a major role in village rituals and parties, with peasant vodka consumption usually episodic and intense and most often connected to seasonal celebrations and church holidays. Yet with industrialization and urbanization during the late 1800s, many peasants migrated to urban areas, bringing drinking habits with them and developing new ones as well. By the start of the twentieth century, clear differences between the cultures of village and urban drinking were emerging. Village consumption was collective in nature and characterized by ceremonial binge drinking during parties, rites of passage, and other important community rituals. Seasonal church holidays offered many opportunities to celebrate with drink. Local and regional festivals took place periodically, so that group celebratory consumption of alcohol, most often vodka, was commonplace. Legal and business decisions, social mobility, elections, collective labor, weddings, and the hosting of guests were all intimately connected with vodka and alcohol consumption.

As wage labor increased and the cash economy expanded amid nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization, the connection between alcohol and rural existence began to dissipate. While tradition and custom were still powerful influences, drinking increasingly became a lifestyle choice, where recreational dimensions began to eclipse the ceremonial. Historically, the Russian peasantry lived in village communes comprising anywhere from four to eighty households, and for centuries, the commune (mir) served as a village community, a major part of the peasant’s entire existence, and an intermediary between the individual and the outside world. This collective assumed precedence over the individual, thus producing a homogenous social structure built around shared interests and values. The mir, although not a formal institution (Andrle 1994), was important in learning and doing gender in preindustrial Russia. These meso-societies exerted powerful influences of gender socialization on members, and while drinking existed in these village environments already (Herlihy 2002), tightly woven community ties were able to limit alcohol’s deleterious effects with relatively effective mechanisms of social control. Violation of traditional drinking norms, by either abstaining or drinking to excess, resulted in social sanctions. However, urbanization, industrialization, and the availability of cheap alcohol ultimately led to the dissipation of these controls, yielding more widespread, unmonitored consumption (Transchel 2006).

Changing Sites of Interaction

As the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries unfolded, Russia’s urban populations grew faster than any other demographic group (MacKenzie and Curran 1999). Many peasants migrated to cities, where the tavern assumed many of the social functions of the village commune. The new prominence of this site of interaction is important because drinking practices were no longer subject to the constraints of communal society. Taverns and beer halls were very often located in working-class neighborhoods or next to factories, and workers in cities therefore consumed alcohol more frequently and more spontaneously than before. These developments suggest a significant shift in the culture of drinking, where older practices were gradually displaced, and where tavern culture increasingly segregated and stratified the lower and working classes by rank, income, status, and, of course, by gender. The traditional, ceremonial patterns of peasant drinking transformed into more routinized, recreational, and habitual practices among the new urban proletariat and especially among men (Transchel 2006). Although alcohol played a significant role in constructing masculinity in other settings, the tavern emerged as an important setting for drinking and as one of the primary fields within which masculinity was actively structured. The tavern was almost exclusively a man’s world, where drinking was predominantly a masculine activity, and this setting transformed into one of the pivotal sites of interaction where masculinities were continually constructed, negotiated, and enacted (Phillips 2000).

Another historically prominent site of interaction was the workplace and the working-class culture surrounding it. Women were often wage earners alongside men, but they were nonetheless excluded from workplace culture as the “other” or as “nonworker” (Ashwin and Lytkina 2004). Analyzing drinking behavior in this sector of society helps illuminate important power relationships, as the urban proletariat was clearly gendered (Engel 1996). Rank-and-file laboring men closely identified with the consumption of alcohol, but this is not to say that women did not drink. Rather, men’s drinking was an important element of worker identity and an important dimension with which to delineate themselves from “others” like women and nonworkers. Such behaviors were common within the ranks of the working class, as sobriety was far less frequent than imbibing and often, of course, inebriation.

Alcohol and working-class masculinities thus converged so that “real workers” were men, “real workers” drank, and “real workers” drank in taverns and other sites of masculine camaraderie (even in and around the workplace). Because alcohol played such a central role in many workers’ lives through shared consumption and socializing, working-class men symbolically identified with one another and formed a cohesive community (Phillips 2000; Transchel 2006). Both through their status as real workers and drinking in tightly knit groups (on and off the factory floor), working-class men could identify with the idealized image of the Soviet workingman and hegemonic conceptions of masculinity. Such workplace dynamics offered working-class men access to new and previously inaccessible sources of power and status. Accordingly, the workplace is a historically significant interactional and institutional field critical to understanding men’s pursuit of the cultural ideal of working-class hegemonic masculinity, a theme to which we now turn.

Masculinity and Alcohol

The Bolshevik vision for transforming Russian society aimed to pointedly address traditional gender arrangements (Issoupova 2000). While this may have been an initially laudable goal, traditional power relationships persisted as Bolshevik radicalism ultimately gave way to Stalinist authoritarianism (Connell 2009), in part because existing gendered power relations were not addressed outright (Ashwin 2000) and because gender differences were considered biological and, therefore, natural (Kay 2006). Men were intentionally stripped of their roles and authority in the home but were nonetheless able to reassert power and influence in the public sphere (Kukhterin 2000)—via the state—by adhering to the party’s vision of the devoted worker. Women, however, remained for the most part relegated to the domestic sphere, despite increasing labor participation (Kiblitskaya 2000b).

Working-class women in particular were often tasked with trying to minimize the negative social and economic impacts of men’s alcohol use on the family unit (Hinote, Cockerham, and Abbott 2009a; Kay 2006). The Bolsheviks molded a facade of liberation for women, but the roles ascribed to women tied many to the traditional idea of domestic femininity as tightly as ever, whereas men were now able to establish new identities in serving the state as workers or party functionaries and continue their social and institutional domination over women (and some groups of other men). It was ultimately the cultural ideal of the Soviet workingman—and the adoption and assertion of a new ideal of masculinity—that would become inextricably bound to alcohol in the working classes. This hegemonic masculine ideal would eventually help concentrate harmful patterns of alcohol consumption (and consequent alcohol-related mortality) among middle-aged working-class men.

A Hierarchy of Masculinities

Within a hierarchy of masculinities, dominant and submissive gender forms emerge from immediate contexts of interaction over time. Specifically, the language of Russian workingmen reflects the deep and pervasive link between drinking and gender. Drinking and drunkenness were masculine behaviors; sobriety and abstention, especially from strong spirits, were appropriately feminine traits. Other research discusses the significance of “conversational cockfighting” in tavern settings and interactions (Campbell 2000), and in Russia, gendered language historically played a significant role in linking alcohol to masculinity. Laura Phillips (2000) writes that this connection is perhaps most notable in workingmen’s remarks toward their peers, where men often used a number of feminized and emasculating epithets to call into question the maturity, sexual identity, and masculinity of nondrinking men.

Perhaps the most widely employed taunt in these situations was the “red maiden” (krasnaia devitsa), which denotes a shy, bashful, and therefore effeminate person. Real workingmen were expected to consume strong drinks (i.e., vodka—not beer or wine), so krasnaia devitsa implied both sexual inexperience and the inability to distinguish themselves as part of a dominant masculine culture. Another taunt leveled upon abstainers also reflects the deep connection between sobriety and femininity in working-class culture—mokraia kuritsa (wet hen)—which draws upon several elements of Russian popular culture. Not only is the feminine linguistic form for “hen” (kuritsa) employed over that of “rooster’ (petukh), but in Russian culture women were commonly associated with chickens by reference to the proverb, “a chicken is not a bird, and a woman is not a person.” A third and final epithet was that of baba (a peasant woman), which again firmly stigmatized the nondrinking man as part of the feminine world.

The act of drinking itself also served as an important mechanism by which masculinity was enacted among workers. Workingmen would not only drink together on the factory floor, in a back alley, or elsewhere, but every new worker would undergo important initiation rites, usually involving the purchase and consumption of vodka. A newcomer may leave a substantial portion of his pay in the tavern, but his peers could then consider him a real worker and a real man. Even the appointment of a new foreman required ritualized ceremonies whereby fellow workers expressed respect for their new supervisor through the purchase and group consumption of vodka, with the foreman reciprocating (Kiblitskaya 2000a). Drinking (especially vodka) effectively symbolized one’s rite of passage into the worker’s world, and consumption associated with the workplace also gave the factory a special masculine significance (Transchel 2006).

The construction of gender emerges from these mechanisms. Because “real” men closely identified with hard alcohol, drinking was an important mechanism for differentiating men and women, and participating in group binge consumption allowed men to access dominant conceptions of masculinity. Overtly masculine behaviors were often restricted in other public spaces, but masculinity was openly expressed, asserted, and defended within the tavern and in the factory as well. The tavern developed in prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Russian society as an arena where these dynamics could unfold through cursing, fighting, and, of course, drinking. This was an important space of interaction, as manhood could be publicly asserted, challenged, or defended, or conversely, where men of questionable or subordinate masculine standing could try to access the power of hegemonic masculine forms. These examples not only emphasize the importance of masculine performance more generally but also the significance of particular situational contexts in demonstrating and affirming masculinity. Masculinity always risks being called into question through “masculinity challenges” (see Messerschmidt 2000) arising from threats, taunts, or insults from other men and/or from situationally defined gender expectations. These challenges orient behavior toward specific masculine expectations (i.e., drinking, fighting, cursing, etc.), or they can press noncompliant men into various subordinate masculinities. This conceptualization emphasizes the significance of language and interaction in generating and enforcing masculine hierarchies and shows that only situationally appropriate behaviors can help a man defeat such a challenge, thus channeling and reproducing social behaviors like heavy drinking.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution, these settings assumed greater significance because masculine occupation of public space became more tenuous after 1917. That is, the traditional patriarchal structure of imperial Russia, where power descended from God to the tsar and then down to each and every male head of household, was displaced by the Bolshevik assertion that class superseded gender (Kukhterin 2000), resulting in challenges to masculine domination in the home and in other public spaces. Since Soviet leadership expressed considerable disdain for behavior like heavy drinking, fighting, and other working-class pastimes, the state was effectively asking men to stop being masculine, thus reinforcing the important role that the tavern occupied in postrevolutionary Russia (Phillips 2000).

The tavern and the workplace were thus significant in constructing a hierarchy of working-class masculinities and providing fields of action where men could identify with hegemonic masculine ideals through the ritualistic behaviors surrounding alcohol. Heavy consumption of strong spirits like vodka in group settings allowed working-class men to enact masculinity and access the power, prestige, and dominance of a hegemonic masculine form, and attain an elevated status position as a real man and a real worker. Conversely, these dynamics also categorized other men (who either consumed weak spirits or abstained altogether) in various strata of subordinate masculinities and denied them status and power stemming from gender hegemony. Even parts of the upper classes and the intelligentsia were excluded from this conception of working-class masculinity. In these ways, masculine hierarchies were created, transformed, and enacted. The so-called real workers and real men were able to access hegemonic masculine status and power, but this hegemony would come with a price—the health effects of prolonged heavy drinking.

Multiple Levels of Analysis

Hegemonic masculinity operates at multiple levels of social organization, and interactions in the tavern and workplace are exemplary of various micro-level contexts used to enact working-class masculinity. Interactions among men and women were also significant in these contexts for delineating the “other” and are probably the most obvious sites for observing behavior aimed at distinguishing femininity from masculinity and hegemonic from subordinate masculinities. Many other examples of these micro-level dynamics could be cited, if space permitted, extending into public parks, dining halls, workers’ cooperatives, clubs, neighborhood streets, and other locales—all heavily saturated by alcohol (Transchel 2006).

Moving beyond local contexts of social interaction, however, the dynamics surrounding hegemonic masculinity operate institutionally through the family, the workplace, and the economy. The forces of socialization within the working-class family were intimately tied to the development of masculine identities, many of which were related to alcohol. The salience of alcohol in working-class culture meant that virtually all family members drank in some form or another. Even infants and small children consumed small amounts of alcohol, but by adolescence, gender distinctions began to emerge. Boys were encouraged or prodded to consume alcohol as a rite of passage into manhood, serving to distance young men from children and from the meddling maternal (i.e., feminine) influences of their early lives. Failure to enact these ritualized practices elicited social sanctions, ridicule, and disappointment. Through these early masculinity challenges, fathers and the broader network of men surrounding the family strongly encouraged young men to imbibe, and usually initiated these practices between about fifteen and nineteen years old. Not coincidentally, these years overlapped with the young man’s entry into the workforce, highlighting the important and dynamic connection between family and work amid these unfolding influences (Phillips 2000).

In the postrevolutionary period, the Bolsheviks strengthened the public sphere at the expense of the private. The family, or more specifically the male figurehead, was a barrier to more effective state control of individuals, so the state challenged the authority and dominance of these men outright. The immediate and long-term consequences of these events are discussed elsewhere (e.g., Kukhterin 2000), but one effect of the Bolsheviks undermining masculinity in the family was that men sought to express and assert it in other settings—in smaller social groups and other fields of interaction—thus magnifying the significance of the economic sphere (and the workplace) in the enactment of working-class masculinities. Connell (1987, 84–7) points to similar outcomes during times of crisis, where family destabilization results in attempts to restore dominant expressions of masculinity. When the state delegitimized patriarchal power in the family, the expression of masculinity was pressed into different fields, where men could regain status and restore power.

The social organization of the workplace reflects these developments at the institutional level, as vodka was consistently used to establish masculine dominance and to maintain hierarchies of power. Workers already established in a particular workplace would routinely demand payment in vodka in exchange for on-the-job training. Apprenticeships were commonly linked to payment in this manner, and this was yet another way that skilled or privileged workers were able to assert power over subordinate men (Transchel 2006). In addition, men often found themselves in humiliating and/or restrictive positions at work (Kukhterin 2000), so that expressions of masculinity also spread to recreational locales—like the tavern—where alcohol could again be used as an instrument to access power when other gendered fields were more restrictive.

We can observe similar masculine manifestations at the state level as well. First, the traditional patriarchal state is the epicenter of the broader structure of power relations vis-à-vis gender. Next, it also exhibits a clearly delineated gender regime and division of labor for institutions and citizens, with masculine interests superseding feminine interests at the societal level. In addition, the state creates policies addressing gender issues that favor men and shape masculinities. Accordingly, the state helps constitute gender relations and shape gender identities as well (Connell 2009, 120–21). By contesting Russian men’s authority in the home, the state assumed responsibility for fatherhood and other masculine roles, so that accessing masculine dominance became relegated to other spheres of society. That is, men were also able to reassert their masculine power by identifying with the official state ideology of communism. In identifying with the state on an ideological level, men sought to achieve hegemonic ideals in securing status as workers (or sometimes in the military), and as we have discussed, “real” working-class men closely identified with drink and the gendered dimensions of alcohol consumption. Accordingly, alcohol not only helps shape masculine hierarchies but also reinforces men’s hegemonic identities as workers in service of the worker’s state. In these ways, the intimate connection between hegemonic ideals and alcohol persists through multiple levels of society.

Masculinity, Drinking, and the Body

We contend that masculinities, their hierarchies, and the hegemonic ideal are all intimately connected to alcohol, men’s bodies, and men’s health in the Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet contexts. Bodies are objects of social practice, but bodies are also agents in social practice (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 851). Men’s bodies are affected in an epidemiological sense (i.e., morbidity/mortality), but men’s bodies are ultimately employed in the enactment of behaviors linked to hegemonic masculinity.

The socioeconomic transitions associated with urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in conjunction with the Bolsheviks’ rise to power, challenged masculine authority. Challenges to traditional domestic authority, and the shift from village mir to urban proletariat, pressed masculine expression out of the village, out of the family, and into fields like the workplace and the tavern. Many working-class men also experienced a sense of powerlessness in the workplace, thus channeling the construction and enactment of masculinities into more permissible social environments like the tavern, where masculinities could be openly contested, challenged, and won or lost—often through drink and other masculinity challenges. Other sources (e.g., Phillips 2000; Transchel 2006) describe the tavern as a safe haven for men through the first half of the 1900s, and as a refuge where they could openly discuss their plight as workers, fathers, and husbands, and embody masculinity through heavy drinking. Existing research provides many examples of masculine performance and health consequences relating to the body (see Connell 2000, 2009), and the physical health consequences of men’s heavy drinking in Russia are better understood in this light. Perhaps most relevant are studies of working-class men in industries around the world that illustrate how bodies are consumed, worn down, injured, or killed (Connell 2009, 57). For example, Donaldson’s (1991) discussion of working-class masculinity in Australia emphasizes how the physical destruction of the body (through labor, injury, or environmental hazards) as the site of masculinity is actually one way to demonstrate and perpetuate masculinity itself. Examples like this one appear to closely parallel the working-class drinking practices that we discussed above, where men effectively employed their bodies as instruments in pursuit of enacting masculinity and establishing hierarchies of power.

Examining the relationship between masculinity, alcohol, and Russian social and political history enables us to firmly connect gender constructions to alcohol, and see how these patterns became well entrenched by the twentieth century, with drinking becoming a symbol of masculinity and abstention an important dimension of femininity, so much so that drinking was commonly equated with being unfeminine and sobriety referred to as unmasculine (Herlihy 2002, 93). Industrialization, urbanization, and labor migration, along with various other social, political, and cultural influences, including the shift from tsarism to Soviet communism in Russia, constituted a perfect convergence of factors, where the weight of masculinities fell squarely on the health of countless men. We argue that the origins of alcohol-related mortality trends in Russia beginning in the 1960s are closely tied to the connection between hegemonic masculinity and the heavy consumption of alcohol (especially vodka). In this discussion, we are able to span the micro–macro divide by tracing these important influences from the level of individuals through practices, institutions, and the state and back to the level of agents and interaction. Clearly, this pursuit of hegemonic ideals has not come without a price, and that cost is succinctly represented in the consequences evident in men’s health. Life expectancy statistics tell one story, but perhaps more telling are indicators of healthy life expectancy: fifty-three and sixty-four years for men and women in Russia, respectively, in 2006 (World Health Organization 2008). The mortality dynamics emerging in the 1960s are in large part a result of alcohol consumption (Cockerham 1999; Nemstov 2005), and our analysis emphasizes one of the important origins of this exploding mortality.

Conclusion

This article uses hegemonic masculinity to examine the historical dimensions of alcohol use and its impact on Russian men’s health. While health in the former Soviet Union is a multidimensional concept involving multiple causal relationships, we identify one of the important sociocultural origins of men’s harmful drinking practices by focusing on the historical construction and enactment of masculinities in two prominent social fields—the tavern and the workplace. We employ Connell’s (1987, 1995, 1998; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) ideas because these explanations account for the relational nature of hierarchical masculine forms at multiple levels of social organization. This framework also offers a useful way to connect class-specific hegemonic masculine ideals to lifestyle dispositions and therefore men’s bodies.

The construction of masculinities is intimately linked to specific behavioral dispositions and therefore exerts a profound impact on health and longevity. Heavy drinking of strong spirits elevates or maintains a man’s status in working-class social groups by facilitating access to power associated with the hegemonic ideal of the real workingman. Conversely, abstaining or opting out of ritualized drinking practices is characteristic of various subordinate masculinities, which are marginalized, infantilized, and/or feminized by groups of dominant workingmen. While few actually achieve the hegemonic ideal, heavy drinking is one way that workingmen without access to dominant masculine resources (e.g., money, power, influence, etc.) attempt to construct masculinities that they can indeed access. Accordingly, structures of masculinities predispose lifestyle behaviors that damage health and promote premature mortality, but these behaviors also reproduce and reinforce the very structures that promote them in the first place. This reciprocating mechanism is critical because it explains how these behavioral patterns are reproduced over time to affect large numbers of working-class Russian men. If we conceptualize the connection between masculinities and alcohol in this way, then we can identify how these behaviors become entrenched and begin to shed light upon the persistent, long-term nature of men’s harmful drinking (and consequent mortality trends) throughout the twentieth century as well.

Our analysis also builds upon the frameworks of other authors (e.g., Bourdieu 1984, 1990; Cockerham 2005) by extending the analysis of gender to more adequately consider the influence of masculinities in health lifestyles and outcomes. Dispositions toward alcohol stemming from the pursuit or emulation of hegemonic ideals are likely the dispositions born of habitus (dispositions reinforced through interaction, institutions, and the state). Transformations in working-class life chances accompanied the social and economic changes taking place in the immediate prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary periods, so that new habitus dispositions emerged from these novel conditions. Working-class socialization and learning to “do masculinity” were often deeply embedded in ritualized drinking practices, therefore sustaining the generational transmission of specific habitus configurations—including dispositions toward harmful modes of alcohol (especially vodka) consumption. In these ways, it is possible to more specifically theorize the health effects of masculinities across multiple levels of scale.

We may also extend these explanations beyond the working classes. Despite the ubiquitous threat of heavy alcohol use and its negative health consequences, other research (e.g., Kay 2006) suggests that the connection between men, masculinities, and drinking is as strong as ever. Drinking and holding large amounts of alcohol remain defining features of Russian masculinity, and men often experience considerable social pressure (masculinity challenges) to drink. While the alcoholic is perceived negatively, the abstainer continues to experience feminizing or infantilizing stigma, where he is considered shy, insecure, and unable to interact with women. Of course, the cure for these conditions is vodka, and the drinking man is depicted in Russian popular culture as one who drinks before fighting, before sleeping with a woman, or in preparation for still more drinking. Furthermore, as the USSR collapsed, new gender forms emerged in post-Soviet societies. Novikova (2000) describes a return to the patriarchal, paternalist, and authoritarian state structure in Latvia that resembled the model preceding Soviet annexation of this country. This situation resembles that of many former Soviet countries, where hegemonic masculine ideals (perhaps best exemplified by Vladimir Putin himself) continue to influence social interaction, institutions, and the state (Connell 2009).

In conclusion, several issues should be acknowledged. First, we focus on one specific historical window in Russian history. We do not intend to make unnecessarily broad historical generalizations regarding a uniquely complex history. In the interests of historical precision, we examine the prerevolutionary period from approximately 1850 up to the mid-twentieth century, when the long-term demographic effects of heavy alcohol use emerged in official statistics. We also specifically focus upon the Russian working classes. While our intent is not to depict the working class as an overly homogenous group, our language speaks directly to working-class dispositions, behaviors, and masculinities to discuss the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and alcohol. It is important to acknowledge that there exist many behavioral nuances within this socioeconomic group, so that behavioral practices among working-class men may differ by job, region, and so on. Previous research (e.g., Cockerham 1999), however, confirms the concentration of premature mortality within this demographic group. We also focus our analysis on two specific fields. While work remains a primary field of interaction and important in the assertion, development, and enactment of masculinity for many class strata (Meshcherkina 2000), the tavern’s popularity eventually subsided in Russia. Patrons therefore had to venture farther from home or factory to find a drinking establishment, and the number of taverns never again approached the number existing prior to the prohibition of alcohol from 1914 to 1921 (Transchel 2006, 140). Nonetheless, the tavern remained a significant element of worker culture originating in the tsarist period.

In summary, we have offered a sociohistorical explanation for Russian men’s negative drinking patterns by drawing upon the concept of hegemonic masculinity. In working-class circles, the pursuit of hegemonic resources, power, and prestige has historically been closely associated with men’s drinking. By tracing the development of masculinities at multiple levels of analysis within unique Russian social and historical contexts, we have shown how masculine hierarchies permeate social interactions and shape behavior. In addition, our discussion contextualizes many of the alcohol-related health issues facing men in these societies today, from cardiovascular disease to suicide and homicide. Finally, connecting masculinities to Russian men’s bodies emphasizes the importance of gender analysis in understanding their health, and ultimately their mortality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to specifically thank Professors Raewyn Connell and Michael Messner for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this manuscript. They would also like to thank Meredith Huey Dye, Sinikka Elliott, Patti Giuffre, Jason Adam Wasserman, Christine Williams, and three anonymous reviewers for their critical evaluation of the ideas contained in this article. Finally, thanks to the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and the College of Liberal Arts at MTSU for their valuable research and travel support related to this project.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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