Vodka Drunkenski

"I can't drive, so I'm going to walk all over you!"

"Drink is the joy of the Rus."^note 'Rus' being the early Medieval nation from which modern Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians originate.

— St. Vladimir the Great

Glorious Mother Russia. Supposedly, it's the coldest place on the planet, and really depressing. The obvious solution to this problem? Booze — and lots of it. So much, in fact, that there's a good chance that any given Russian character in fiction will be The Alcoholic, or at least will look for the slightest excuse to get drunk. They also tend to see green imps rather than Pink Elephants. And they probably have the stout constitution necessary to withstand intoxication, because Mother Russia Makes You Strong.

Somewhat Truth in Television; alcoholism is a rather large problem in Russia and is a major contributor to high suicide rates and lowered average male lifespan.^note Things were so bad at quite a recent point that it was the lowest of any industrialized nation, though there's a lot more to that than booze. Vodka sales were also a prime source of revenue for the Russian government for much of its history, going as far back as the dawn of Tsarist Russia — the first ruler to use alcohol tax as a major source of revenue was Ivan the Terrible. Many bottles of cheap vodka in Russia came with a paper pull tab rather than a screw-top because (like its owner) it's going to be drunk in one sitting. In fact, aftershave is reported to be marketed in recycled vodka flasks so people don't look cheap while drinking it.

Amusingly, the word "vodka" (водка) is actually a diminutive form of the Russian word for "water".^note  That would be "вода" ("voda", pronounced roughly like "wadda"), which does happen to be cognate with "water". So jokes about Russians "drinking vodka like water" (or not knowing the difference between vodka and water) actually have a grain of truth in them.

Also, this trope is sometimes extended to people in former Warsaw Pact countries, partly as a result of cultural osmosis and partly because life just sucked that much.

This trope previously was slowly going on its way towards Discredited Trope — not that anyone in the Fictionland has taken the notice, though. Ever since Turn of the Millennium alcohol consumption in Russia was on a steady decline, so much that by some measures Russians drank less than Brits! This was largely due to the country slowly finding its feet again after Soviet collapse, and the people discovering new things to do with their lives instead of drinking it away, and The Government's easing up on the alcohol tax — since 2000 much of the state revenue came from the oil money, not booze, and in The New '10s other industries have increasingly started to become profitable as well, for which the healthy and sober populace is generally a good thing.^note  We're talking a truly dramatic change here - From 2003 to 2017 the average lifespan of Russian men has increased from 65 to 73 years! However, Russian alcohol consumption has grown after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting loss of Russian international trade has worsened Russian life, making this trope very modern again.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Hetalia: Axis Powers was bound to feature this seeing as its premise calls for spoofing National Stereotypes. Vodka is to Russia as "Pastaaaa~!" is to Italy. In his introduction alone, Russia states that vodka is his fuel.
• Subverted in Classi9 with Tchaikovsky. He can sure drink a lot, and is as eager to get others drunk if his drinking contests with the others are anything to go by, but vodka has little to no effect on him and therefore, he was never seen drunk.
• It's probably not coincidental that the drunken Hei at the beginning of season 2 of Darker than Black was stationed in Russia.
• In Yugo The Negotiator, Yugo is very quick to recognize the vodka gesture while on a train during the Russia arc. Drinking quickly ensues.
• General White from Dragon Ball is heavily implied to be of Russian origin, and sure enough, he spends a lot of his time drinking a substance that's presumably vodka.
• Mikhail "Misha" Kaminsky, one of the members of the zeonic Cyclops Team in Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, is a big and burly russian who always carries a flask of booze with him in his mobile suit's cockpit during missions. It's what we see in a Gory Discretion Shot, flailing around when the Gundam Alex's chaingun fils the Kampfer with holes, pulverizing Misha in the process.
• In Yuri!!! on Ice, Viktor gets trashed often, though he prefers beer instead of vodka.
• Memories Magnetic Rose has Ivanov. He's not drunk in the short but he does keep liquor on hand, even while in space.
• In Shy, Russia's superheroine, the aptly named Spirits, is perpetually sloshed and often has a bottle of vodka in her hand, outright complaining when a hole in her stomach keeps her from drinking. Despite this, when not behind the wheel, she's actually a great hero.

Animation

• Sensorso Bear from Squirrel and Hedgehog symbolizes Russia. He's a lazy drunkard.

Comic Books

• When The Boys go to Russia, they stay with a Russian ex-superhero who drinks some unholy abomination home-made liquid that no one (but Hughie) drinks- they just toss it back over their shoulders. We later learn it's not vodka, it's made with, among others, tank brake fluid. And Hughie grows to like the stuff. Vas claims at one point, when he and Hughie are the only ones to not go down from a poison that was somehow killed by the stuff, that "this shit would probably kill AIDS virus."
• When Lucky Luke is the bodyguard of a Russian grand Duke, said ambassador likes to shout "Fedia! Vodka!" and "Fredia! Visky!".
• Alex "Spaceman" Glushko in Top 10 is a former cosmonaut and special interrogator for the eponymous police department. He drinks, a lot - which is a problem for his co-workers since he mainly communicates telepathically, meaning they get his headache, too.
• In Rising Stars, Jason is able to steal almost all of Russia's nuclear arsenal because the men assigned to guard it are hammered.

Comic Strips

• The Russian bear is often drinking something topical in political cartoons.

Fairy Tales

• "Ivan Turbincă": The titular Russian soldier is an absolute party animal who really loves to drink, to the point he gets demons exhausted with his constant partying.

Fan Works

• In the Love Live! fanfic Flowers Drenched in Vodka the half-Russian and half-Japanese Eli suffers from alcoholism. Eli is abusive towards her girlfriend Hanayo while drunk. Both Hanayo and Eli realize that Eli needs to do something about her illness however Eli prefers to shove it under the rug and keep it a secret. This comes to a head when Eli beats Hanayo so badly due to mistaking her for cheating that the police are called in, she's arrested, Hanayo is put in the hospital for a concussion, and their friends learn of their issues. Afterwards Hanayo tells Eli that she either needs to go to rehab or she'll press charges, and the two take a break from their relationship.
• In A.A. Pessimal's Strandpiel, we meet the Ankh-Morpork Air Police. The commander and deputy commander of the air police are Discworld Russians. Lieutenant^note Later, a Captain; after the birth of her twin children, Vetinari notes the expanded size of the Air Watch, and suggests to Sam Vimes its commanding officer should have a pay grade that better enables her to raise a sudden family. Olga Romanoff decrees the wings of a new pilot who has just gone solo for the first time should be wetted, according to time-honoured tradition. In vodka. Olga is also celebrating a more personal happy event and reasoning that being pregnant should not affect her ability to have a drink. And that her unborn child had better get a head for it early. A riotous party ensues and the new pilot becomes happily drunk.
• Happens a lot in KanColle fanfic and fan comics, with the usual suspect being the formerly-Japanese, now Soviet destroyer Verniy. Examples include Yua's Fleet Journal, Ido's long-running untitled comic, and CV12Hornet's Things Involving Shipgirls That Are No Longer Allowed. (Note that Verniy's original characterization has nothing to do with alcohol in general or vodka in particular.)

Films — Live-Action

• In Doctor Strangelove, we only hear President Muffley's side of the conversation with Soviet Premier Kisov, but even without the ambassador's word on the matter it's fairly obvious that Kisov is sloshed.
• Ivan Vanko in Iron Man 2 is very fond of his vodka. Even the burd loves vodka. His father wasn't so alcoholic until he was forced out of the US by Howard Stark for trying to profit off the Arc Reactor research. After that he turned to alcohol to numb the pain of being forced to live out his days in Siberia and died a drunken mess.
• The Russians acknowledge the stereotype as well.
  • Case in point, the Peculiarities Of The National Hunt, a film where a group of men (all of which as Russian except for a young Finnish man studying Russian customs) go hunting, only to spend several days mostly drinking. One of the men is an army general, so when the hunting party forgets several crates of vodka, his men have them airlifted via helicopter. The Finnish guy even asks his friend when they're actually going to to hunt something. An interesting twist is that the Finnish man keeps dreaming of an old-fashioned Tsarist hunt, involving dogs, horses, and dozens of men, who, despite also drinking, actually do hunt. Rather ironic considering that Finns are also stereotyped as heavy drinkers - sometimes by the Russians themselves. The film was followed by three other Peculiarities of the National... films. The second film involved fishing, the third had another hunt, and the fourth was about politics. All of which, naturally, involve a lot of drinking.
  • There is a joke about a Finn and a Russian going into the woods with a few days' worth of vodka. The Russian ends up making small talk with the Finn (stereotyped as EXTREMELY quiet outside of the sauna) after a few days. The Finn says something along the lines of "Shut up. We came here to drink, not talk."
• Another example from Russia/the Soviet Union is 1980's Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. Gurin the hockey player is a teetotaler in 1958, but after the 20-year Time Skip he's a raging alcoholic. His wife blames his alcoholism on all the hockey fans that kept foisting drinks on him.
• The Irony of Fate is a Russian romantic comedy from 1976 in which this is crucial to the plot. Zhenya goes out celebrating with his friends after getting engaged. Zhenya's friend Pavlik has to catch a plane, so they take the party to the airport, but everyone gets so drunk that a passed-out Zhenya gets put on the plane instead. After it lands he's too drunk to realize that he's taken a taxi home to the wrong apartment in the wrong city. Hilarity and romance ensue when the woman who lives there comes home.
• In another Russian comedy, Hussar Ballad, the protagonist, Shura (a girl disguised as a man), tries to blend in with other officers, which involves consuming a lot of alcohol. Hilarity Ensues.
• Vasiliy Stalin in The Death of Stalin. He was an alcoholic in Real Life and drank himself to death two days before his 40th birthday. The film also begins with a portrayal of how Stalin really did like to spend his evenings; getting his close circle drunk, playing pranks on them and watching movies.
• In Bad Boys II, members of The Mafiya meet up with the movie's Big Bad and get presented with their deceased colleague (in a bucket). Later on, when Mike and Marcus assault the mansion, Igor shows up as well absolutely fucking wasted calling himself the "Russian Grim Reaper of Death" and proceeds to lay waste to half of the mansion's illegal drug traffickers himself before trying to outdraw a platoon of SWAT team members who tell him to lay down his arms.
• Subverted in Star Trek Beyond; Chekov prefers scotch to vodka and is never seen drunk on-duty.
• In the 1935 version of Anna Karenina, Vronsky and his buddies engage in a drinking game in which each soldier has to take three shots and then crawl under the table from one end to another. And then again, and again, and again. After he wins by virtue of being the last person not passed out on the floor, Vronsky staggers over to his buddy Stiva and says "Now we can settle down and do some drinking."
• From The Three Stooges:
  • In the short The Three Stooges: "Grips, Grunts and Groans", there is the Russian-sounding wrestler Ivan Bustoff that enjoys his cocktails of "vodka, tequila, and cognac". One plot point has the Stooges try to keep him sober before a big fight.
  • In Dunked in the Deep, Mr. Borscht (who is a spoof of Alger Hiss) drinks very strong vodka. One segment has Shemp have a shot — and steam blew from his ears and almost knocked him out. Moe and Larry tossed aside their drinks when Borscht wasn't looking — and saw the vodka destroy the wallpaper it struck.

Jokes

• There is an old Russian joke that the intermediate stage between socialism and communism is alcoholism.
• How do they drink vodka in Northern countries?
  Sweden: With water.
  Finland: Without water.
  Russia: Like water.

Literature

• In the novels featuring the Russian Investigator Arkady Renko, Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square, Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs and Stalin's Ghost, Russia is shown as a place where everyone drinks and smokes. Constantly. In fact, when Renko is locked inside a storage freezer by a bad guy and almost freezes to death, everybody simply assumes he accidentally locked himself in there while trying to get high on gasoline fumes (he was actually trying to light an oily rag to set off the alarm system to get help).
• From the Jack Ryan series:
  • Colonel Filitov from The Cardinal of the Kremlin is seen drinking almost every time he appears in one of the books, and mentions that "he wouldn't have gotten sick if he'd had a little more antifreeze." Much of that drinking is to try to forget about his dead family, whose deaths were part of what drove him to become The Mole for the CIA.
  • A lot of other Russian characters in the series are also often seen drinking (with vodka being the tipple of choice), though most of them usually aren't drunk.
  • Alcoholism is a plot-relevant off-"screen" detail in The Hunt for Red October: The wife of the renegade submarine captain Ramius died of complications from appendicitis. The doctor that was to perform the surgery was drunk, and while breathing pure oxygen to try to sober up her appendix burst. The still-inebriated doctor fumbled the surgery to remove the burst organ, resulting in the death of the wife of Ramius. Ramius' dissatisfaction with the Soviet state started at this point, when the surgeon wasn't punished because he was the son of a high-ranking party official. ^note Some people have complained that the captain of a Soviet ballistic missile submarine is too important a position too let this slip that easily — in a somewhat similar Real Life incident in 1985, when a bunch of drunk Dirty Cops robbed and murdered a KGB officer on the Moscow Metro, the scandal went high enough as to end in the all-powerful Minister of Interior Shelepin's resignation, but the book was written decades before the Iron Curtain came down and the details of the Soviet political life became known to the thriller's authors.
• Vorkosigan Saga: Barrayar, which is at least to some extent Russia IN SPACE!, has "getting drunk" as one of the great traditions.
• Moscow - Petushki. While many Russian writers try to subvert or avert this one-dimensional stereotype, Venedikt Yerofeyev, who modelled the protagonist after himself, plays it painfully straight, and with good reasons. Although vodka was not the protagonist's main tipple. What he usually drank was worse—in some cases, possibly even dangerous. Although all of the recipes in the book should be essentially harmless—if you consider drinks with over 50% alcohol harmless.
• The Bridge to Holy Cross by Paullina Simons. The female protagonist, a former Russian nurse who's come to the United States, is going to travel with a Red Cross team into the Soviet Zone in now-conquered Germany. Her superior complains about the amount of booze she's packed.
  "Have you ever met Russians before?"
  "No..."
  "Trust me, we will need the vodka."
• The Primary Chronicle, a Russian historical account written in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, includes the statement, "It is the Russians' joy to drink; we cannot do without it."
• One novel about the USSR's mental health institutions had several doctors joking about the state of their nation. One claimed that Russia had achieved Communism. Another stated they were still practicing Socialism. A third claimed that they were backsliding into Capitalism. A fourth stated that the true state of Russia was Alcoholism.
• Animorphs: During one mission to prevent the Yeerks invading a world summit, Rachel (in elephant morph) crashes into a world leader's room, sitting in his underwear and drunk out of his mind. She doesn't name him, but one of the leaders is Russian.
• In The Amber Spyglass, Will at one point ends up in the care of a very drunk Russian priest while searching for Lyra.
• In the Dick Simon duology, while Dick is at the academy, his boss asks him why he doesn't drink. While he doesn't do it because he was largely raised by the four-armed natives of Tayahat, who don't drink, his usual excuse is that his father is Mormon. The boss calls bullshit on that excuse, pointing out that his mother was Russian, and (according to her), Russians will drink anything that isn't "mule's piss". So, Dick is forced to learn to drink and hold his liquor. Also, she met his father, who isn't a practicing Mormon. Furthermore, she knows full well that Dick drinks hot tea and coffee, which are supposedly forbidden in Mormon faith. Besides, he's training to be a CIA agent (yes, it still exists in the distant future), and avoiding alcohol would look suspicious if he were ever to go undercover. So he's ordered to learn to drink, and also to quickly learn Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Ukrainian (he's a bit stumped by the last one, but agrees). His Texan instructor immediately agrees to pair off each languages with the appropriate beverage: tequila for Spanish, rum for Portuguese, horilka (Ukrainian vodka) for Ukrainian... crap! What would they drink for Arabic? They settle on mixing sherbet with gin.
• In Blood Promise, Rose visits Russia for Dimitri's funeral. Naturally, alcohol is being passed around...though not the grade she's used to.
  "What is this?"
  "Vodka."
  "No, it isn't. I've had vodka before."
  "Not Russian vodka."
• Vodka Politics by Mark Lawrence Schrad is a non-fiction book on the subject of alcohol, mainly vodka, in Russian history. Author even complains in the introduction about people making fun of him playing to the stereotype - supposedly, he might as well write a book about "bears and balalaikas". But rather than play this trope straight, it's more of a deconstruction; author writes about political influences on alcohol trade, influences of alcohol on military and politics, as well as the history of anti-alcohol movement, tracing how it often contributed to economics collapses (considering alcohol tax was an important source of revenue for the state). For Schrad, this trope is a Serious Business.

Live-Action TV

• Nearly every character in Chernobyl drinks a lot of vodka. Early on a character (who is admittedly a secondhand "expert") claims that the treatment for radiation exposure is a glass of vodka per hour for the next few hours. The army (and conscripted) liquidators sent to the region are also provided with free vodka to numb them up from shooting pets so that they wouldn't die of radiation poisoning or contaminate areas outside the exclusion zone, evicting people from homes, and the other physically and emotionally grueling duties they had to undertake. At the top, Boris Shcherbina always seems to have a bottle and a glass ready to hand. However, two of the real life Russian miners on this Sky News report clearly felt this trope was being taken too far:
  Andrey Nasonov: (laughing) Look, they're drinking vodka! No one ever drank vodka while we were working...
  Vladimir Naumov: Andrey, you can't be so picky about this, it's just a film...
• In Season 5 of The Crown, John Major describes having to deal with Boris Yeltsin, whom he never has seen sober.
• In one Mama's Family episode, the family briefly hosts a Russian exchangee, Olga. While playing the board game version of Pyramid, Mama is describing items to take to the beach to Olga. This is Olga's reply to the clue for suntan lotion:
  Olga: Vodka.
  Mama: VODKA?! Who the hell takes vodka to the beach?!
  Olga: EVERYBODY!
• Some Cultural Posturing on Star Trek: The Original Series:
  Scotty: When are you going to get off that milk diet, lad?
  Chekov: This is vodka!
  Scotty: Where I come from, that's soda pop. Now this is a drink for a man.
  Chekov: Scotch?!
  Scotty: Aye.
  Chekov: It was inwented by a little old lady from Leningrad.
• SCTV had an episode constantly being hacked by Soviet TV - an ad for vodka, that played like a Western beer commercial, shows a model worker relaxing at a bar with his friends after his shift, but as a responsible citizen of the State, he quits after one drink, in contrast to "the decadent Uzbeks", seen in a boorish, drunken daze. This is one of several examples seen of Uzbeks being held up as state-sanctioned targets.
• A Saturday Night Live skit from the year 2000 featured Bill Clinton (played by Darrell Hammond) having a Split-Screen Phone Call with Vladimir Putin (played by Will Ferrell), who had just taken over for Boris Yeltsin at the time. Putin mentions that he's getting rid of some of Yeltsin's things. Cut to a wide shot revealing that Putin is packing away countless alcohol bottles.
• This glorious performance from a Russian talent show.
• On a self-deprecating note, Świat według Kiepskich is a Polish sitcom about a "typical" Polish family and most of the main cast are alcoholics, with vodka and cheap beer being their drinks of choice.
• On World's Dumbest..., more than half the clips from Russia involve alcohol. This always gets Frank Stallone going about how much he hates Russia.
• In an episode of The West Wing, a Ukrainian Parliamentarian named Vasily Konanov shows up at the White House, eager to meet the President. And by "shows up," we mean "crashes the front gate and demands to meet the President loudly in Ukrainian until someone takes him inside."
• Danger 5. While the entire team is known to divulge in drinking at pretty much any given moment, Ilsa is rarely ever seen without a drink in her hand and gets violent when suffering from withdrawal.

Music

• The chorus to the English version of Dschinghis Khan's Moskau gives us:
  Moscow, Moscow, throw your glasses at the wall, And good fortune to us all, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, hey!
  Moscow, Moscow, join us for a casatchok,^note A traditional Ukranian folk dance We'll go dancing round the clock, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, hey!
  Moscow, Moscow, drinking Vodka all night long, Keeps you happy, makes you strong, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho, hey!
  Moscow, Moscow, come and have a drink and then, You will never leave again, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
• The epic Complete History Of The Soviet Union, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris confirms that "The U.S. gave us crystal meth, and Yeltsin drank himself to death".
• Russian-American musician Regina Spektor depicts herself chugging an unnamed alcoholic beverage while wearing a colonel's hat on the cover of her 2004 album ''Soviet Kitsch.''◊ Some promotional images for the album show her in a similar pose.
• "Vodka," by the Finnish band Korpiklaani.
• LITTLE BIG's "Everyday I'm Drinking."
• Robbie Williams' "Party Like a Russian".
• Viktor, the Russian subject of Billy Joel's "Leningrad," turns to alcoholism to get through life:
  Went off to school and learned to serve the state
  Follow the rules and drank his vodka straight
  The only way to live was drown the hate
  A Russian life was very sad
  And such was life in Leningrad

Tabletop Games

• In the drinking/card game DrunkQuest the warrior class has an ushanka, uses a sickle as a weapon and has a preference for vodka.

Video Games

• Grigori the informant from Alpha Protocol. Thorton can even mock him by smashing a bottle over his head and saying he spilled his wodka.
• Arknights: Sniper operator Pozëmka enjoys her alcohol, to the point of backtracking when someone she just disagreed with mentioned wanting to invite her for a drink. Ironically, she used to be The Teetotaler before she fled her homeland of Ursus (the in-universe equivalent of Russia) and only turned into a drinker after becoming the citizen of an underground city populated with alcohol-loving Little People.
• Nikolai Belinski from Call of Duty: Zombies. Every quote he says basically refers to vodka and getting drunk in some way. In fact, he actually can't function without vodka, or a "vodka-based serum".
• Played to the hilt in the final level of Destroy All Humans! 2, where Crypto has to sabotage a Soviet / alien alliance, but every argument he has falls flat, until he gets desperate and yells the last thing he can think of: "They're takin' away your vodka!" The assembled cosmonauts are horrified and outraged, immediately turning on their alien allies en masse.
  • The map "Gorod Krovi" has his Good Counterpart from an alternate dimension encountering this version, as well as puts a Harsher in Hindsight spin on this alcoholism; Nikolai, despite his stories of his many, many wives, only ever had one. After she was killed in a bombing, he turned to vodka and his mental state declined until that was all he knew.
• Fortune teller Kalderasha in Dragon Quest VIII, after losing his crystal ball.
• Dukov in Fallout 3.
• In Mercenaries 2, we have Misha, whose alcoholism is justified by his being a jet-flying Drunken Master. Also, he claims that his jet is in such bad condition that nobody would voluntarily get into it while sober.
  Misha: Some people call me a stereotype. Have no stereo, can't type. SO THERE!
• Metro 2033 takes place After the End in and around the Moscow subway system. Since the agricultural infrastructure of the world has been destroyed by nuclear war, their vodka is made from mushrooms.
• Randall Lovikov from No More Heroes, who spends all his time slouched over the counter at the local bar. His tendencies don't seem to make him any worse at fighting, however, as he has several techniques to pass down to Travis.
• Metal Gear:
  • Granin from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. The game even takes place in the USSR, so it's not as though this was the one Russian character in the cast. MGS3 fanfic tends to portray everyone at Groznyj Grad like this.
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, we have Colonel Skowronski, the former commander of the San Hieronymo Soviet Missile Base, who is heavily implied to be drunk in his appearance (he was slurring his words a lot of the time, laughing at seemingly inappropriate times, and Roy Campbell refers to him as a drunk when he calls you right after you locate him). Actually, several of the soldiers on the San Hieronymo Peninsula were implied to drink a lot (one of the calls to Para-Medic, should she be recruited, has her being confused about why they were having headaches at the height they are at as the mountains shouldn't be high enough to cause altitude sickness, until she realizes that they actually had amplified hangovers from drinking too much alcohol at the height they currently were at). It's probably justifiable that they did so, considering the fact that their nation essentially screwed them over by abandoning them at the peninsula shortly after they abandoned the construction plans in order to make it seem as though they were renegade Russians.
• Operation Flashpoint:
  • During the mission "Undercover", a fellow resistance fighter in civilian clothes convinces a Russian checkpoint squad to let our truck go through by inviting them to some vodka
  • Russian soldiers talk about how "they are gonna get wasted when they get back home" during the cutscene in the mission "Escape from Prison"
  • In the Red Hammer campaign, after saving a Damsel in Distress , the protagonist Dmitri Lukin needs a good drink first.
• Trope Namer: True to the ongoing theme in Punch-Out!! of boxers based on absurd stereotypes, Russian combatant Vodka Drunkenski followed this trope to the letter — in the arcade version. The NES version Bowdlerised his name to Soda Popinski, but all his taunts still make obvious references to alcohol and drunkenness. When not boxing, he spent his time between rounds suckling a soda bottle and making puns about being punch-drunk or unable to drive. In the Wii game, soda really is the focus of his obsession. He fizzes and bubbles when punched. There are still some hints at being a drunkard, mostly in the form of Bilingual Bonus: when taking out his bottle, he says "За моё здоровье!" (Za moyo zdorove!) which is Russian for "For my health!" (a common alcohol toast line), and if the player knocks away his bottle, he'll say "Моя бутылка!" (Moya butylka!), meaning "My bottle!" and fly into a rage and attempt to beat Little Mac up using his Soda Fury technique. Incidentally, the toast may be a bit of Leaning on the Fourth Wall, because it really does recover his health. He also has a slight drunken slur to his voice.
• Lilya from Reverse: 1999 is an Ace Pilot from Russia alongside being an Arcanist capable of using magic. Almost all of her dialog is about drinking, getting a drink, or offering others a drink regardless of whatever is happening, her drink of choice is vodka, and even the game's stats page lists her magical medium as "Vodka." It's heavily implied she's never really sober, even when flying her rocket-propelled broomstick in combat.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:
  • Shadow Of Chernobyl features this trope rather blatantly. The game is set in the former USSR (the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine/Belarus to be exact) and if the player's radiation meter gets too high, vodka of all things can be used as a cheap means to rid the body of radiation. Also, while vodka causes the screen to sway and flash white, there is actually no limit to how much your Slavic character can drink. In other words, it is fully possible to load up on over one hundred bottles of vodka, drink them all within ten seconds, and somehow come out of it with no more than a very wobbly screen and repeated flashes of white. After about a minute, the wobbling comes to an abrupt halt and you'll be perfectly fine.
  • Serious intoxication is almost bound to happen in the first game - at one point, you have to raid a bandit base (alone, to boot) to get a key to a nearby underground lab off their leader and if you poke around in the right area can raid their armory. There's nothing too staggeringly awesome in there - they're bandits, not Duty or the Monolith - but if you look in the right box you can find almost thirty bottles of vodka. You have a weight limit of fifty kilograms (of which you'll probably be carrying at least thirty or forty in armor, guns, ammo, medical supplies, food, artifacts, and stuff you looted from the corpses of the bandits you just killed), a bottle of vodka weighs half a kilo apiece, and chances are you'll never be through this area again. Drunkenness (and possibly drunken gunfighting) ensues.
  • In Call of Pripyat, the mechanic in the first area cannot make modifications to your equipment without vodka, even if he has the tools. One drink is a small discount and first tier upgrades, two drinks is a higher discount and all upgrades... and three drinks puts him to sleep for a few hours. He claims it helps him keep his hands steady. May be Drowning His Sorrows over lost friends, too. It crosses over into Drunken Master, although if you find and bring him the PDAs of his buddies and show him the Gauss Rifle, which he worked on in the past, he gets over his alcoholism and joins up with the other technician after the game ends.
  • Subverted in the same game; vodka for some reason depletes your nourishment level and drinking at least six bottles of vodka can actually kill you. Yet this is also amusingly double subverted if you have at least a loaf of bread or other piece of food in your bag as you can munch it up and keep on drinking then rinse-wash-repeat.
• StarCraft: Vice Admiral Alexei Stukov is the resident Russian Guy Suffers Most and has a fondness for vodka. The trailer of Brood War has his superior officer DuGalle telling him his vodka can wait, his portrait in Remastered can be seen sipping from a glass of wine, and one of his lines when clicked on in Heart of the Swarm is pretty much I Need a Freaking Drink.
• While Zangief from Street Fighter goes for a different huge Russian stereotype, those who look closely at his home stage in either Street Fighter II or Super SFII will immediately notice that at least two people in the crowds are chugging down on bottles of what seems to be vodka. Zangief himself pulls out a bottle in one of his win poses in Street Fighter Alpha 3, then proceeds to chug and spit out fire.
• Averted in Team Fortress 2. The massive Russian Heavy Weapons Guy? Nothing passes his lips but his Trademark Favorite Food Sandviches. The team alcoholic? The Scottish Demoman. It must be said, though, that the Scots are one of very, very few cultures who might conceivably hold their own in a drinking game with the Russians.^note The Heavy prefers peach Bellinis, but says that "the bubbles give me a headache."
• In the Tropico games, being an Alcoholic gives a boost to USSR relations.
• Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic: All workers imported from the USSR have around 30% of the alcohol addiction stat.

Visual Novels

• Despite being a teenager, Hard-Drinking Party Girl Sofiya from Missing Stars already has a taste for various alcoholic beverages.

Web Animation

• The Russian sailors in Adventures of the Puffincat very much enjoy drinking. The Puffincat tries to join them, but fails as usual.

Webcomics

• Dmitri from Spacetrawler.
• Russia from the Polandball meme/comic series is very often shown drunk and/or with a bottle of hard liquor in hand. Finland also loves his vodka, partly because his home is cold, dark, and depressing, and partly because he has to put up with Russia.
• Subverted in Cyanide and Happiness. A Russian character decries another character's beer and proclaims his preference for vodka... in the form of fruity cocktails.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation uses large quantities of alcohol to contain SCP-4680, formerly Grigori Rasputin, by allowing him to be constantly drunk. To be fair, his version of immortality doesn't allow severed bits to grow back, so he's less than thrilled with the current location of his genitalia.
• One of the adventures of this hotel worker is entertaining a Russian guest who demanded a drinking buddy.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • When Springfield is a candidate to host the Olympics, the elementary school puts on a performance for the International Olympic Committee - including an ill-fated "patriotic" stand-up act from Bart:
  Bart: So, you're from Russia, huh?
  Russian representative: Da!
  Bart: You drunk yet?
  Russian representative: (sadly) Da.
  • The highest level of drunkenness in Moe's breath analyzer is "Boris Yeltsin".

Real Life

• Russians have absolutely no use for shot glasses. Vodka is commonly served "Sto gramm", which means "100 g" (which equals 0,1 l - that's a normal water-glass instead of a shot glass of 0,02 l), and a smallest standard drink is usually 0,05 l. But they're not going literal and will often serve you a 0,25 l glass filled to the top as well. Historically, before metrication, this was even reflected by the standard liquid measures, centred around "charka" (cup) of 123 ml, considered a normal drink of vodka (though much less strong than now, roughly about 28-30% abv, unless we're talking about nobility-grade vodka which clocked up to 70%) or wine, with a shot being half of that. After the introduction of the new measures, these were metricated to 100 and 50 ml respectively.
• World War II took this to an institutionalized level, with each Soviet soldier being entitled to the famous hundred grams of vodka daily.
  • A common practice was that the men in a unit would pool their rations and take turns drinking themselves to stupefaction. While this liquid courage was no small virtue in an army that suffered 8 million dead, it also meant that at any given moment a large portion of the Red Army was tanked off its ass, with all the fun things implied in having a huge number of drunk men with guns and vehicles. On top of that, some of their German enemies were hopped up on methamphetamine and other experimental narcotics. No one dares to venture the Eastern Front sober.
  • Officially the Red Army soldiers were supposed to stay sober and alert all the time and the vodka ration to be distributed only in extreme emergencies. The authorities quickly found out nearly every day on the Eastern Front counted as a dire emergency.
  • When World War 2 ended, the Soviet people celebrated so hard they drank virtually all the vodka in the country in less than 24 hours (granted, there was a lot less vodka available because starch, grain and potatoes were used to produce food rather than booze, but still).
• Catherine the Great tried to avert this. She went looking for a way to give her army a proper alcohol ration (remember, these were the days before water purification), but one that was much less likely to lead to an army of drunks. So, she contracted with the English to make a beer that would do the trick, and they delivered. The resultant so-called "Russian Imperial Stout" was specially formulated to be high-alcohol (9-12%—much less than vodka, but about as high as you can go with beer unless you play weird tricks with it) both to suit Russian tastes and to survive the trip across the Baltic unspoiled.
• Boris Yeltsin. Especially in the later years of his presidency. At one point, while visiting Bill Clinton in Washington, D.C., Yeltsin turned up in his underwear on Pennsylvania Avenue, trying to hail cabs. During The '90s, Jay Leno always first referred to Yeltsin in the monologue as "Boris 'Buy Me A Drink' Yeltsin." At one time, his plane was flying to Ireland for a refueling stopover, and the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) was on hand to receive him. But instead of landing, the plane circled Shannon Airport and circled until it landed. But Yeltsin never made it off the plane, his doctor stating that the President was not feeling well. For a little while afterward, "circling over Shannon" became Irish slang for "trying desperately to sober up before an important event." This is referenced at one point in The Simpsons, where the highest possible reading on a breathalyzer's scale is "Boris Yeltsin". Among the other "achievements" of the Yeltsin administration were his contributions to modern dance and music conducting. Modern Russian Internet satirist Gaius Anonimous, who lampoons the daily buzz as the supposed doings in the Ancient Rome during the early Principate, even invented a faux-Latin name for him — Gaius Borealis Alcoligula.
• Peter the Great really loved his booze. He was known to serve wine by the quart per person. To paraphrase from the man himself:
  Peter The Great: "Any guest here who does not get drunk, would not merit my friendship."
• Moonshining was one of the most frequent crimes during the Soviet Union. Not that alcohol was particularly expensive (except during the Gorbachev years) but that sugar was so damn cheap. The USSR wanted to support Cuba and bought ungodly amounts of sugar from that nation, but Ukraine already had a very productive beet sugar industry and the Soviet system decided not to shut it down. The end result was that one of the key ingredients for moonshine was one of the cheapest things in Soviet Union, and alcoholics took advantage.^note It also did no favors for the Soviet Union's collective sweet tooth, but no matter Soviet water and gas^note Heat speeds up the fermentation process and is of course needed to distill the fermented booze into "vodka". was also unmetered, you could use as much as you want and the government would just average out the costs and charge everyone. As it was easy to steal sugar (since it was so cheap and plentiful) an experienced Soviet moonshiner was limited only by the size of still they could conceal.
• There is a legend that when Vladimir the Great of the Kievan Rus' (the precursor to both Russia and Ukraine, Vladimir himself ruled from 980 to 1015) decided it was time to abandon paganism, he said to have studied the religions of neighboring countries. While the authorities liked a lot of what Islam had to say (and liked even more the lucrative trade contacts that would come with converting, to say nothing of the chance to cement an alliance with the Turks and knock the Byzantine Empire out of its misery^note The Rus' had always coveted Constantinople and led several futile assaults on the city before they converted to Christianity,) upon realizing that it meant giving up alcohol, the idea was dropped entirely—it was too much a mainstay of life even then. Hence the page quote.
• During the Cold War, both major powers were looking for good Truth Serums to extract information from the enemy. The CIA looked into all kinds of mind-altering substances (including LSD) as part of Project MKULTRA, and were embarrassed by the FBI when all these exotic chemicals failed but the Bureau got actionable intelligence on a mob heist by lacing a captured mafioso's cigarettes with THC. The KGB, on the other hand, decided to just use vodka: agents trying to extract intel would get into a drinking contest with the other guy, and since the Russian (by this trope) would have much higher tolerance, the the other guy would probably start leaking secrets long before the agent.
• During the latter half of Leonid Brezhnev's tenure as leader of the Soviet Union, alcohol abuse skyrocketed among the Soviet population, to the point where the average life expectancy of the Soviet population took quite a hit. It got even worse during the brief tenure of Yuri Andropov. Andropov cracked down on slack on corruption in the Soviet system, and being aware of the negative effect this could have on moral, halved vodka prices so people could cope. Keep in mind that alcohol was already extraordinarily affordable thanks to the command economy not raising the prices since Stalin despite inflation.
• Up until the early 2010s, beer was not classified as an alcoholic beverage in Russian law; that dignity was reserved for beverages with 14% abv (28 proof) or greater. Anything less—including all beer—was considered a mere "foodstuff".
• It's been said that Americans make a distinction between those who drink and those who don't; Russians make a distinction between those who drink vodka and those who don't. Those who drink samogan (moonshine) are a separate category altogether. Good samogan clocks at least at 60% vol (120 proof), often 70% (140). The same status is reserved for medical antiseptic alcohol (96%, or 192 proof, mostly safe for consumption) or various surrogates of similar strength, many of which aren't so safe.
• It is probably no coincidence that Korsakoff's Syndrome was first described by and named after a Russian neurologist. While not actually caused by alcohol, it is often a side effect of alcoholism as alcohol provides the body with a lot of energy but virtually no nutrients at all and people who consume almost nothing but alcohol suffer from severe damage to the brain and nervous system from lack of vitamin B1. While it can be caused by other forms of malnutrition, this disease is what people are talking about when speaking of drinking your brain to death.
• French artists of yore killed themselves with absinthe. Russians, naturally, preferred vodka:
  • Famous Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky had a drinking problem that is widely considered to have hindered his career and contributed to his early death.
  • An equally famous artist Alexei Savrasov, known for his landcapes, was an accomplished alcoholic by middle age, and^note when his friends didn't manage to find him in time lived on the streets, paying for booze, food and shelter with his paintings. Eventually he was committed into the asylum, where he died, drunk and destitute, and art critics invented an awesome classification category of "drunk Savrasov".
• Dmitri Mendeleev, discoverer of the Periodic Law and father of the Periodic Table of the Elements, wrote his dissertation in 1865, entitled "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol". This came in handy when, 28 years later, the Tsar put him in charge of the Bureau of Weights and Measures; one of of Mendeleev's first tasks was standardizing vodka, and he came out with a regulation that all vodka in Russia had to meet exacting standards of purity (having discovered the means of detecting impurities) and be 40% ethanol (a standard which not only persists today, but has spread around the world to be the standard strength of distilled liquor almost everywhere). Ironically, one of the consequences of Mendeleev's involvement was a switch from the traditional distillation to simply diluting the rectified grain alcohol with water to the required strength, which, while successful in its goal of ensuring the drink's purity, has completely changed its character. What originally was not unlike the unaged grain whisky, became the neutral spirit later known for.
• How do they drink vodka in Northern countries? Sweden: With water. Finland: Without water. Russia: Like water. Oddly enough, "vodka" means "little water" in Russian. Or, alternately, it might be a contraction of "razvodka" or "dilution" — a crucial step in its production, as when vodka was still produced by distillation, both first and second distillation were diluted in half (by weight) with spring water, ending with the 38-39% abv strength, from which the now traditional 40% abv ultimately derives.
• In a subversion, one Russian agent during World War II was sent to get into a drinking contest with a Turkish dignitary. However pretty soon the Russian was babbling like an idiot and the Turk was gleefully recording everything; Turks, being brought up on the formidable Rakı (nicknamed Lion's Milk), know how to handle drink. For reference, Rakı, due to its high anis contents, will turn milk-like opaque emulsion when water is added. "High", here, meaning over 50% alcohol. Oddly, while Turkey is officially a secular state, its population is 96 percent Muslim. A religion that forbids drinking in a nation that invented one of the most powerful alcoholic beverages known to man.
• In another subversion, Norwegian Prime Minister Einar Gerhardsen once visited a Soviet Kolkhos (i.e. a "common farm"), and was served the traditional beverages. What the proprietor didn`t know, was that Gerhardsen never touched alcohol, and was served water. The local man-in-charge presumed it to be vodka, and entered a drinking contest with Gerhardsen. Every time Gerhardsen toasted, the proprietor did likewise, and drank with him. Over time the Russian started to get somewhat unstable, and had to excuse himself. Meanwhile, Gerhardsen continued in the same pattern with his glass of water, and got the reputation as an incredibly hard drinker, being able to drink an experienced Russian under the table. The Russian probably never learned the truth.
• Russian Tanks can run on vodka. As well as gasoline, and, really, anything liquid that burns, though not as good as on traditional diesel. For that matter, so do the drivers.
• The aforementioned superhero drinking tank brake fluid probably didn't need any superpowers to metabolize the stuff. Many technical fluids in the Soviet Army were indeed ethyl alcohol-based: the generals knew their men, were perfectly aware of the fact that they'll try to drink the fluids anyway and made sure no unfortunate accidents will result from this. A famous example of this comes with Russian Air Force: the standard anti-icing solution on many military planes is... ethanol spraying. Somehow, weather conditions logged on air bases used to be consistently worse then ones from a civilian airports / meteo stations just a couple kilometers away... Pilots would even file reports for completely fabricated missions so that they and the crew could swipe the alcohol.
• The Poles are also affected by this, they always argue fiercely with the Russians over who's invented the Vodka/Wodka, which usually ends in both of them drinking together until they both pass out (which requires an awful lot).
• Becoming a slightly discredited trope with younger Russians, who tend to prefer beer, cocktails, and alcopop compared to the muzhik way of vodka by the bottle. Fortunately, at least some of them can still vodka like champs, just not with the expertise of their older soviet dyadi.
• An amusing bit of trivia is that the word for "grape" is the same as the word for "vineyard" in Russian: vinograd (виноград, literally meaning "wine place"). As in, the default context the Russian language affords to the grape is that it's where wine comes from ("Can you also eat them?" "Eh, probably.").
• There is a (possibly anecdotal) story about an Aeroflot pilot who started to see pixies and fairies flying in the airspace around his aircraft. He mentioned this to the company doctor during a checkup. The doctor frowned and suggested this phenomenon was down to the two bottles of vodka the pilot consumed each day. But he suggested a solution that would allow the pilot to keep flying.
  Two bottles is a bit excessive, don't you think? Try to cut down to no more than one, comrade!
• A news article on the controversy over Robbie Williams' "Party Like a Russian" (see Music section above) cited that Russians are "ridiculously good partiers" who "have lived under unpredictable governments for generations" and that "they party like there's no tomorrow because there may very well not be one."
• Ivan Ukhov, a Russian athlete who, at the 2008 Athletissima in Lausanne, attempted to participate in the high jump after consuming numerous vodka and Red Bulls. It went about as well as one would expect. Funnily enough, the same guy would win Olympic gold 4 years later, presumably after being read the riot act by his sponsors.
• During the Cold War, Pepsi managed to convince the USSR to allow the sale of their sugary drink in the nation. However, the USSR's currency was effectively worthless on the global market. Instead, the deal was a straight exchange of Pepsi for an equal amount of Vodka.
• During the Russian Revolution, after the Bolsheviks captured the Winter Palace of Petrograd in November 1917, during several weeks the population constantly raided the palace's huge basement to get wasted on the various alcoholic beverages it contained. They kept on doing it even after the Bolshevik authorities made unsuccessful attempts to stop this alcohol orgy (like flooding the basement).
• The Russian Army does not denaturize the alcohol used as fuel or coolant on its equipment (the alcohol-based de-icer used in the air force and army aviation is particularly famous). They know their troops and that they would drink it anyway, were the stuff rendered toxic or not. While most Russian Vehicles run on diesel or gasoline, Russia also uses mixed fuel engines which can run on fuel of most octane levels, including pure alcohol (though in practice it is often mixed with a much less potent trash fuel first). Most mixed fuel engine personnel transports have a tank of chemically pure ethanol as "Emergency fuel," though we know what it really used for.
• A high-ranking Red Army officer who defected to the West in the mid-1970's described during his debriefing how anything up to a third of all Russian tanks committed to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were immobilised and rendered useless owing to soldiers either drinking vital alcohol-based lubricants, or else using reserve fuel tanks for illicit distilling and transportation of home-brewed vodka - which was so utterly unsuitable for powering a tank that once the reserve tank was switched on, the "fuel" it contained fouled (and often destroyed) the engine. He described a situation where the whole of the march route into Prague was lined by immobilised tanks that had broken down largely for this reason. This apparently also happened a lot during the Soviet Union's abortive attempt to pacify insurgency in Afghanistan in the 1980's.
• Fighter pilot and defector Victor Belenko wrote that oftentimes jet fuel would be dumped and nonexistent flight plans and reports created so that the crews could swipe the alcohol.
• Viktor Suvorov wrote in his semi-autobiographical book how during the invasion of Czechoslovakia, his unit came across an alcohol plant. Next day, all the soldiers were a bit drunk. The commanders conducted a search, and everything that could hold water turned out, naturally, to be full of alcohol. They poured it all out, yet soldiers kept turning up drunk. No one could figure out where the alcohol was... until Suvorov bribed one soldier to reveal that the radiators of the APC's were filled with alcohol instead of water.
• Professor Alexandr Zhankov, a virologist, combined this trope with Absent-Minded Professor in a tragic way. During a research visit to Oxford University's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, he made a habit of drinking laboratory ethanol, but one day, his poor vision led him to accidentally kill himself by drinking methanol. After his death, the faculty checked its supplies and discovered that the amount of ethanol used significantly increased while Zhankov was there.

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In America you consume vodka. In Russia, vodka consumes you.