



My colleague Clifford Levy reports in Tuesday’s New York Times that the Russian government is trying, once again, to find some way of addressing the alarming fact that “Russians consume roughly 4.75 gallons of pure alcohol a person annually, more than double the level that the World Health Organization considers a health threat.”

Among the measures under consideration for curbing what Mr. Levy calls “Russia’s ruinous penchant for the bottle” are tougher penalties for selling alcohol to minors and restrictions on the sale of beer, which has grown more popular. Vodka, though, remains the national drink, and finding a way to keep Russians from drinking it will require some creative thinking.

In 2002, the Russian writer Victor Erofeyev explained in The New Yorker that vodka was supposedly invented by monks at the Chudov Monastery more than 500 years ago, around the time the Russians finally freed themselves of Tatar rule. He added that even though vodka “is unlike other forms of alcohol in that there is no justifiable excuse for drinking it,” it has become such a central feature of Russian life that “some historians compare the Russian national dependence on vodka to the Tatar yoke.”

According to Mr. Erofeyev:

The very mention of the word vodka triggers unpredictable behavior in Russians. It seems to punch a hole directly into the subconscious, setting off a range of odd gestures and facial expressions. Some people wring their hands; some grin idiotically or snap their fingers; others sink into sullen silence. But no one, high or low, is left indifferent. More than by any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises; it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god.

Faced with the task of curbing an appetite for a substance of such legendary power, Russia’s president, Dmitri Medvedev, would no doubt like to find a practical solution that will also enable him to avoid shouldering too much of the blame. He must certainly be aware that the career of the last Russian leader to declare war on vodka, Mikhail Gorbachev, ended badly (for him).

So what kind of scheme could simultaneously help Mr. Medvedev make it harder for Russians to secure the bottles of vodka that they crave and stay in the public’s good graces?

How about planting a series of intelligence operatives in vodka warehouses across the nation with the driving skills of the man featured in this report from the Kremlin-sponsored, English-language satellite channel Russia Today?

While no one has suggested that the forklift driver whose work featured in this report — and the longer version of the video embedded at the top of this post, which has gone viral — was in fact an undercover, anti-vodka agent saboteur, if video of dozens of similar accidents starts to appear online in the coming months, remember, you heard it here first.