In Russia, dozens die after drinking alcohol substitute

MOSCOW — Dozens of people in the Siberian city of Irkutsk died after drinking cheap surrogate alcohol over the weekend, evoking memories of the poverty and social depression that came after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The tragedy was a reminder that while President Vladimir Putin may be taking a star turn on the world stage — dominating the war in Syria and alarming European and U.S. leaders who fear the Kremlin is undermining democracy — Russia remains in many respects a struggling country. For all his bravado, Putin continues to wrestle with domestic economic woes, widening inequality and endemic corruption.

The economy, deeply dependent on oil revenues, was thrown into recession in 2015, after a collapse in oil prices, and is just now emerging tentatively into positive territory. The ensuing collapse of the ruble and Western economic sanctions over the Kremlin's maneuvers in Crimea and Ukraine have hit living standards hard.

The number of victims in Irkutsk — 49 dead, as of late Monday — evoked earlier periods in Russian history when alcohol was restricted and people turned to substitutes. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, who in the mid-1980s ordered shelves emptied of vodka and historic vineyards razed, many Russians drank after-shave, window cleaners and antifreeze.

Now they are doing so again because they can no longer afford even the cheapest vodka. This is particularly true in the struggling districts outside the more prosperous cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Irkutsk, a city of 620,000 people known as the gateway to Lake Baikal, is typical of those locales. Once an industrial center, it faced a bleak future after its markets for heavy machinery vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The victims had consumed scented bath lotion containing methanol, a cheap substitute for the ethanol in standard alcoholic beverages. A local prosecutor, Stanislav Zubovsky, told the Interfax news agency that a total of 57 people went to hospitals over the weekend.

The liquid was sold in local stores for around a dollar a bottle, compared with about $3 for a half-liter bottle of vodka.

Methanol is a highly toxic version of alcohol, commonly used as antifreeze. The bottle was marked as not fit for consumption, but that did not seem to faze the pensioners, students and others who bought it regularly, according to a report by the local version of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper.

It was unclear what went wrong with the batch distributed over the weekend. Local investigators detained seven people on suspicion of distributing the liquid and discovered a workshop where they said the substance was produced. About 2,000 bottles were seized from local stores.

Alcoholism remains rampant in Russia. The government's consumer rights watchdog agency reported in January that alcohol abuse was implicated in the premature death of 30 percent of men and 15 percent of women in the country.

In Moscow, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has called for the government to put controls on the circulation of cheap perfumes and other liquids containing alcohol.

"This is a complete disgrace and clearly we should put an end to it," Medvedev told a Cabinet meeting Monday. "Such liquids should simply be banned."

The Kremlin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, called the situation "a horrible tragedy" and said Putin was aware of what happened, Interfax reported.

The mayor of Irkutsk declared a state of emergency in the city. The authorities ordered the police to check the places where homeless people sought refuge from the bitter winter cold and to post notices warning against the use of unfit substances.