the success of a failure

Origin of the concept

"The success of a failure" is the phrase Daniel Tarschys, a Swedish political scientist, used to evaluate Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign in his 1993 article "The Success of a Failure: Gorbachev's Alcohol Policy, 1985-88" in Europe-Asia Studies. Tarschys's point was that judging a policy by a single yardstick distorts it. Measured by public-health outcomes the campaign succeeded; measured by fiscal and political outcomes it failed. The concept's core is that both verdicts hold at once.

Why it was a success

Launched by a Central Committee resolution and Council of Ministers decree no. 410 of 7 May 1985 and a Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decree on 16 May, the campaign attacked both supply and demand. Output of vodka and liquor was slashed, places and hours of sale were restricted, and prices were raised several times. Between 1984 and 1988 state alcohol sales fell by more than half, and at the campaign's height official sales dropped by nearly two-thirds. Over the same period male life expectancy rose by 2.6 years to the highest value in Russian history; births increased while mortality and crime fell. Illegal samogon distilling did grow, but the rise in illicit drinking did not offset the fall in legal supply, so real total consumption did decline.

Why it was a failure

Alcohol sales were central to Soviet state finance. Before 1985 drink supplied about 25 percent of retail-trade budget revenue, and its high prices subsidized the prices of bread, milk and sugar. In 1985 alcohol receipts reached only 46 billion rubles against a planned 60 billion, leaving a shortfall of 14 billion; deficit budgets continued until 1991. The campaign simultaneously fed the shadow economy. Sugar sales soared, and the number of people prosecuted for moonshining rose from 30,000 in 1985 to 397,000 in 1987. Coercive enforcement, with dismissals and Party expulsions at workplaces, drinking of alcohol substitutes, and neglected vineyards with uprooting in some regions produced widespread public resentment. In October 1988 the Central Committee formally ended the campaign, citing its unpopularity and the loss of revenue.

Aftermath and the mortality crisis

After the campaign ended, drinking rebounded quickly and Russian mortality surged in the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1994 the crude death rate rose by 40 percent, from 11 to nearly 15.5 per thousand. Assessments of the cause diverge. Some researchers hold the economic shock and privatization of the transition primarily responsible. Others point to the campaign's demise itself. One study built a 1978-2000 oblast-level dataset, estimated that the campaign averted about 400,000 deaths per year, and argues that the disappearance of its protective effect explains a large share of the mortality crisis. That reading implies the transition was not as lethal as often suggested, but it is not an established consensus.

Historical significance

The case shows that a social policy's success and a regime's fiscal survival can diverge. A reform in which the state cuts its own revenue base may improve public health and yet, through the fiscal crisis it triggers, undermine both the reform and its gains. Gorbachev later said of the campaign that "because of the mistakes made, a good and great cause ended ingloriously." The late-Soviet budget crisis and the early-1990s mortality surge should be examined together as the opposed legacies of one policy.