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Comment by natmaka | Hacker News Reader

In France, around 1985, an old man said to me that just after WW2 he was, as a French soldier, working in Germany in some airfield or military site which was then used to host Allied soldiers of various nationalities.

They had a problem with Soviet soldiers dying due to some poisonous/toxic substance they consumed.

It lasted for days, maybe weeks. Nobody had a clue.

Then they realized that some/many Soviet soldiers had discovered a tank containing jet fuel and secretly drank from it. Those who drank too much or were too weak just died, but other ones weren't deterred.

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Alcoholism in Russia, and most of the former USSR is just like, real bad. The sex ratio in Russia is something like 80 men : 100 women, and it's mostly due to alcohol.

Do women not drink? Or are men somehow more susceptible?

> Do women not drink?

Kinda, sorta? The global data is roughly "the more patriarchal a society is, the less women drink".

> Or are men somehow more susceptible?

That's also possible, but it's hard to suss out of the data, because the cultural aspects are so large. In some countries, alcohol use is like an order of magnitude higher for men than women, and in others it's roughly equal.

Why were people even drinking jet fuel? Did it have any psychotropic effects?

My guess: jet fuel is commonly kerosene, which if ingested (especially at somewhat palatable dilutions) will majorly fuck you up, but with effects that can somewhat mimic being drunk. That said, it's also going to fry your liver, kidneys, and pretty much anything else, but if you were already a conscript that spent 26 hours a day in a state somewhere between unconscious and drunk, a little kerosene nightcap might be just the thing. And if you ended up in the infirmary, at least they'd change the sheets between patients -- no such luxury in the barracks.

Some universities in the USSR, especially ones that dealt with electronics and silicon manufacturing, would keep their solvents under strict lock and key. Mostly because the military 'cadets' tended to pretty quickly consume any solvents that didn't immediately kill them.

Indeed! The man who told me this did not know the reason but his hypothesis was indeed that they wanted to get drunk.

Thank you for the details. I heard about Russian women hiding their perfumes for men not to find (and drink) them...

It is funny how putting on a uniform instantly makes you ... stupid. It is like a part of your brain shuts off. The social behaviour regress to like 5th grade in adult men.

Like of someone tells you you tie your shoes in the wrong way you become a child mentally or something.

It's probably not the clothing, but rather some aspect of the circumstance that coincides with the uniform (such as, loss of freedom.)

Oh ye ofc. There are many normal professions with uniforms.

But when you are in it, putting on the uniform is the magic transition between the real you and vice corpral Rightbyte.

Loss of freedom is certainly the main factor.

Being a Soviet/Russian conscript is a terrible fucking lot in life. Being raped, beaten, denigrated was and remains extremely common. You're taken from wherever you had probably spent your whole life, thrown into a shitty uniform, shipped off like cattle to wherever it is that the motherland needs you, and used as an inanimate tool until you were either too broken and destroyed to function anymore, or you had managed to survive to the end of your term.

Alcoholism was and remains rampant, and in many cases even encouraged, as to keep the system 'lubricated'. Getting shitfaced on whatever you could find that'd get you there quickly is just an extension of that.

I left the country when I was young, and as soon as I became of age, the military came around my old apartment to find me. I couldn't return to the country for a decade - there was absolutely no way I was going to take even the slightest chance of being in the Russian military.

This is very much the same reason I'm not going back now. It saddens me that I may never step foot there again.

Remember the military bukhankas rolling around in late May and early June, grabbing men off the street for conscription if they looked even a little bit like they'd just finished high school?

I've got a pretty vivid memory of seeing the 'recruiters' grabbing an amputee out of a wheelchair in broad daylight and shoving him in the back of the van along with the several other men they already had in there.

You clearly don't know many people in uniform, to make that sort of sweeping generalization.

I am a NCO in the reserve. I am speaking from experience and I can add that I am not arguing I am smart and others are stupid.

Note, that my emphasis is on the system that make people behave strange.

It is somewhat ironic too, since being a soldier exposes you to so many practical and different problems that are so different each time that there is no room to be actually stupid.

And I am not talking about combat, but mundane stuff like, tying a rope between two trees to hang wet cloths on. In normal life people that would fail at stuff like this can get routine and hide that they can't do such tasks without messing up, but soldiers do so much different things that they don't get routine and if you are a bit off you are exposed.

If you are the kinda guy that can tie ropes between trees to dry cloths on, the military structure makes you behave like you would have been "stupid" in many situation that only is a problem because you lack power.

So Soviet or American sailors, that wanted booze but had no way to get it, solved it in the way they could. In civilian life they could just not have put them self in the situation where they couldn't buy booze.

Hazing is maybe a big problem since you are locked in with some jocks you can't escape since the front gate is guarded by MP.

Simple as that. The limitations make you stupid.

I saw Russians depicted as drinking brake fluid in Beast of War and couldn't believe it. A few searches proved it true!

Here's an excerpt from "Inside the Soviet Army in Afghanistan" by Alexander Alexiev (US Army document):

You cannot imagine what they drink. They will drink shaving lotions and cologne. That's good stuff. Then they will drink toothpaste. The best one is the Bulgarian Pomorin brand. They will simply squeeze four or five tubes in a jar, dilute it with water and drink it. They also drank truck antifreeze, glue, and brake fluid. The brake fluid they used to heat up and put some nails in it for some reason. I don't know why. They will also take shoe polish and smear it on a piece of bread and leave it in the sun until the alcohol separates from the shoe polish. Then you eat the bread and get drunk.

There's a legendary Russian recipe for drinking brake fluid. I've seen claims that this goes as far back as WW2, with Soviet soldiers using their Mosin rifles to treat German brake fluid in this manner.

1. Be someplace very cold.

2. Find a steel crowbar or something similar (metal and long).

3. Stick it in a bucket.

4. Drip brake fluid onto the exposed end such that the liquid flows slowly along the surface into the bucket.

This supposedly filters out most of the chemicals as they freeze onto the cold metal surface, leaving the liquid in the bucket drinkable.

I would strongly advise against actually trying this for real, though.

One can't drink glue. You need to make a mixer head (drill and wire is OK) and collect the solid dissolved mass on it. The rest you can drink.

I read somewhere that some Soviet jets used huge quantities of alcohol for cooling.

Specifically the Tu-22 is known for this.

Many of the Russian fighters still in active service have alcohol coolant. The ground crews are reputed to partake when they want a tipple.

MiG-21 radars used high quality pure ethanol in evaporating cooling system

Some did, however there were no Soviet jets at the time of this story.

Still do, though these days they're a little more efficient, so it's only the flight crew that needs to be cooled with that alcohol.

According to my father, a number of GIs blinded or otherwise injured themselves experimenting with antifreeze around VE day.

Soviet air force personnel had it better. The Tupolev Tu-22 bomber used a cooling system that contained 40% pure alcohol so of course that was constantly siphoned off.

https://youtu.be/bKoHMXggEHU

I read the same story from Anthony Beevor’s book about the battle of Berlin, although I think it was a different chemical. The Red Army seemed to have a drinking problem.

> The Red Army seemed to have a drinking problem.

s/seemed to have/has had and still has/

Life in Soviet/Russian armies is grim. Many of the recruits come from remote regions so poor that they lack fridges, washing machines and even toilets (today as well [2], hence all the looting in Ukraine [3]). Broken-down equipment - either because it was crap from the factory or because someone along the chain sold off parts and fuel on the black market -, substandard equipment, shoddy living conditions, and on top of all of that (which would turn most Western soldiers into alcoholics already) come brutal hazing rituals [1] that traumatise those who manage to survive it (there's tens of thousands of incidents a year, and as late as 2006 hundreds of deaths a year), and the meatwave battle strategy that both past and current leadership have embraced.

No wonder that the Russian / Soviet / Russian army has always been associated with alcoholism, most of them self-medicate with it (or whatever other drugs they can get their hands on). And it's also no surprise given the traumatisation that many of the Russian soldiers act completely depraved on the battlefield - why not rape, torture and kill for fun, when you're probably not going to survive the war long enough to get held accountable?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina

[2] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-plumbing-st...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting_by_Russian_forces_duri...

Look for a copy of Zinky Boys. It shows the conditions for Soviet soldiers during the Afghan war, I think it hasn't changed much.

Don't forget shitty leadership - harsh, anti-intellectual, and expecting obedienece, not initiative.

Where have I heard that before?

> today as well

To be fair it’s hard to reconcile with them being paid relatively high wages due to manpower shortages (since they are generally reluctant to send conscripts into Ukraine).

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