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Comment by namanyayg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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