Russia's foremost alcohol epidemiologist, whose estimate that the anti-alcohol campaign saved over a million lives anchors the scholarship
"The anti-alcohol campaign saved the lives of more than 1 million individuals." Nemtsov's conclusion from a quarter-century of research.
A pioneer of alcohol epidemiology who graduated from the Moscow Medical Institute, trained as a psychiatrist, and spent his career at the Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry. Spurred by the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign, he developed methodologies to estimate real alcohol consumption and the scale of alcohol-related mortality, arriving at the benchmark estimate that the campaign saved roughly one million lives. Tracking the waves of alcohol-driven excess mortality through the Gorbachev era and the post-Soviet collapse, his empirical work became a cornerstone of demographic debate on Russia's mortality crisis.
Career Timeline
- 1933Born in Moscow
- 1977Awarded Doctor of Medical Sciences
- 1982Began researching alcoholism; from 1985, its epidemiology
- 1987Developed methodology for estimating real alcohol consumption
- 1990Developed methodology for alcohol-related mortality estimation
- 1996Head, Dept. of Informatics and Systems Research, Moscow Research Institute of Psychiatry
- 2011Published A Contemporary History of Alcohol in Russia (Södertörn University)