Here in the US I haven't had vodka in years. The US right now has such great beer that drinking any other alcoholic beverage should be illegal. Possibly the very best anywhere in the world. Not even Germany/Austria/England come anywhere close to what you can buy on the US West Coast.
Even in Russia though the attitudes are changing. Anecdotally, meeting with my university friends a year ago we drank only beer, and they said they mostly drink wine (beer in Russia is pretty bad still, although the situation is improving).
German brewers of mass-produced beer still stuck to the requirements of the German beer purity law when elsewhere, such as in the USA, brewers were putting rice and maize into their beer to cut costs.
Germany gets a good reputation because they make a certain type of beer extremely well, like Belgium makes Belgians extremely well.
Alcoholics drink hard spirits or cheap "fruit wine" if they are poor.
Everybody drink vodka (and wine, and beer, but wódka is the tradition) on big occasions like marriage or other big family meetings. But getting wasted isn't cool and very few people drink too much usually.
(Swede here.)
Young men[0] around here still bond via drinking lethal amounts of vodka. I know of at least one death caused by this.
[0] The gender imbalance in CS is so severe that I remember bragging to my friends how I was not only acquainted with both of the female students in our year at the Warsaw University of Technology, but also both of the ones that started studying CS in 2010 at the University of Warsaw.
Yeah, that was a tough one to swallow, literally.